Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave

Andrew Huberman:
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Ryan Suave. Ryan Suave is a renowned expert in addiction treatment and trauma recovery. Ryan has spent decades on the front lines helping people overcome addictions to substances like alcohol and various drugs, as well as behavioral addictions, including gambling, video games, and pornography. His approach combines evidence-based protocols tailored to each person's unique family history and needs. During today's episode, we explore all aspects of addiction, including the relationship between addiction and trauma. Ryan shares insights from his extensive clinical work and provides clear, zero-cost protocols for effective recovery that leverage neuroplasticity, which is your brain's ability to change with intention and experience. We discuss and compare residential treatment programs, 12-step programs, self-guided addiction recovery, and more. If you or someone you know suffers from addiction, the information and tools offered in this episode ought to be of tremendous benefit to initiate and maintain sobriety from that behavior or substance. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Ryan Suave. Ryan Suave, welcome.

Ryan Soave:
I'm glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

Andrew Huberman:
You're the guy that people call, reach out to, cry to when everything comes crashing down. That's kind of your thing.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And you have this incredible gift, really, to orient people in time and space when that sort of thing is happening. And you do this for men, women, teens, kids, adults, families. You've pretty much seen it all, although I'm sure there's more to come. I would love for you to just explain to people listening what addiction is and how you see it show up in people's lives. I know that you tend to get things like a trauma surgeon would see the human body, hemorrhaging and in need of great support, but how do you think about addiction?

Ryan Soave:
First, I'd like to make a little bit of a distinction. We're going to talk about addiction. When we look at the DSM, the diagnostic manual that we use for diagnosing psychological disorders, not really addiction as a diagnosis. That's not super important necessarily because we can talk about it in the term of addiction, but we can look at people and look at biological, psychological, and social factors and make a diagnosis to see that they've got a substance use disorder or an alcohol use disorder, whether it's moderate or severe, or they're dependent on it. And not to give people an out, but not all people that show up with an alcohol use disorder for a point in time are necessarily an addict. They may not be forever. It might have been a life circumstance that brought them there. That said, someone that at a point in time in their life could have an alcohol use disorder or substance use disorder, they're probably prone to that, and they probably shouldn't continue down that path or gamble with it. So talking about addiction in general, I like to broaden that definition. A question I'll ask people is, does it have you, or do you have it? Is it driving you and your behaviors, or are you really leaning on it in a way that that's your medicine? Because I don't really see addiction as the problem. Addiction is the solution. Whatever they're addicted to is the solution to some underlying stressor. I think as humans, when we're uncomfortable, when we're experiencing pain, our immediate reaction is to get out of that. And when that stress becomes really big, we're going to look for the things that are going to impact us a lot quicker. Taking a drink, using a drug. Now, once people start doing that, depending on what it is, if it's heroin or fentanyl, they can become physically addicted to it very quickly, or alcohol over time. But I think the definition can be expanded to a lot of other things, maybe even things that seem mundane, and we can have addictive behaviors at different points in our life and maybe have the same behavior that sometimes is addictive and sometimes isn't. This is very mundane, but sometimes I'm binge-watching Netflix because I'm on a plane and don't have anything to do, or I'm sick and I can't get out of bed. And other times, I might have a really stressful day or have something going on that I don't want to deal with, and I end up watching TV too late, and then I don't sleep. And now, is that an addiction that I need to get treatment for or be pulled away from my family for? Probably not. But I think in talking about addiction, we want to understand, what is it that people are using, whether it's a substance or a behavior, and why are they using it? While I say addiction is not the problem, it's the solution, it's a solution that becomes very problematic for people. And you will know this better than I or will be able to explain it better than I would, but they get a benefit in their brain and body for feeling the sense of relief that they'll feel when they use the substance. One of the doctors who initially supported the people who founded Alcoholics Anonymous, his name was Dr. Silkworth, and he wrote this opinion, and he said, "Men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol." I believe that effect is relief. So people are looking for some sort of relief. And the question has to be, I think when we're talking about addiction, what is it that they're looking for relief from?

Andrew Huberman:
So when somebody comes to you, or in some cases is brought to you-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... who's in the throes of addiction, what's your first line of attack, so to speak? Are you focused on what the underlying stressor is, or you're trying to stabilize them? These are people who sometimes, and sadly, I've seen this in my friends, fortunately who are now sober, but people who wrap the truck around a tree at 7:00 in the morning, having drank a bottle of wine and taken a Xanax, or jail, or worse, right?

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And so when somebody comes in, what are the first questions that you're asking, and what's the goal?

Ryan Soave:
Let's talk about the most acute first. So I serve as the chief clinical officer for Guardian Recovery. We do treatment in different states. We serve thousands of people a year, and we have medical detoxes that we start with. So if somebody needs to be detoxed from alcohol or drugs, they're going to come in, we're not going to start asking questions about what the underlying stressor is. We're going to first do medical assessments, nursing assessments. Sometimes we have to send them to the ER if they're in dire need, or they're so acute that they can't even be in the facility that we have. We're going to just get them physically stabilized. And as we're getting them physically stabilized, the thing with addiction is a lot of people just say stop. But for people that just stop, and assuming they're not in danger, like in alcohol if you just stop, you could have seizures and die. Other drugs, if you just stop, it can be extremely uncomfortable. But even if they went to a detox and were able to stop, their life doesn't generally get better right away. In fact, a lot of times it gets worse. Now, maybe it's better in the fact that they're not about to die, they don't have these physical symptoms, but emotionally, they've been using this substance or alcohol as a medicator. Now, all of a sudden, the medicine's gone. And they've got to deal with life. And so they can actually feel a lot worse right when they come in. So first, what we're going to do is really understand what's going on with them biologically, so that we can make sure they're safe. And then as we can support them over the days that they start becoming a little more comfortable, their physical conditions start to stabilize, then we can start to really understand what's going on with them and their environment. What is their pattern of use? When do they use? What are the effects that it's having in their life? Because we want to understand how it's playing out everywhere, like I said, biologically, psychologically, and socially. And really get a clear picture of who this person is. And sometimes people come in more motivated than others. Sometimes they get brought to us, like you said. And I've seen it work either way, that someone who comes in and says, "I need help. I'm willing to do anything," that they end up not following through with their treatment. And other people that come in fighting and screaming end up doing very well over time. I actually like it when people come in in that kind of struggle. I think, the more people struggle with something upfront, it's like you pull an arrow back. The further you can pull the bow back and hold it, the more tension in it, the farther it's going to fly. And I really like when we have people who say, "I'm not going to do this," or, "I'm going to leave." They're actually telling us something about themselves and where they are, and we can be there with them in that struggle. Sometimes people will come in, and they're just checking the boxes, and they're going to be a good student, and everything's fine because they're not drinking anymore. And then we're never able to really get to the causes and conditions of it. When they're in a treatment setting, we'll have them for anywhere from seven days to 90 days. We like to keep them, and understand what's going on with them, so we can meet them at their different stages. And the environment, we try to create a microcosm of their social universe so that they can experience some stressors while they're-- We're not creating the stressors, but we're having them communicate with their families. We're having them face some of the things they don't want to face. And we have a saying that says, "Treatment can't really begin till the crisis occurs." And what that means is more of the internal or existential crisis. If someone's coming in going, "I'm great, everything's great," maybe things are feeling great right now, but why were they drinking or using in a way that was harming themselves, others, ripping their lives apart? Sometimes people will say addiction is a choice. I don't buy that all the time. But people will say that. And what I would say to that is, even if it is a choice, even if people could wake up and say, "I'm going to do this," or, "I'm not," why would they continue to choose a life that they're hurting themselves and others? So while they're in treatment with us, we want to start to really understand who they are, start to understand what is happening in their environment, and then as they stabilize more physically and then they stabilize emotionally, is we can start to raise their capacity to experience difficult emotions. I say this all the time to my clients, what I really do with them is help them learn how to feel bad. We don't put that on the website because no one's going to come to us to say, "How can I feel really bad?" But I think that's at the core of it. How can we build a distress tolerance so that they can face discomfort, they can face pain, and not choose the thing that gives immediate short-term relief that's going to end up hurting them and those around them? To allow them to really lean in To whatever that discomfort is. And when people are able to be available for the depths of discomfort, then they really become more available for the heights of joy and satisfaction in life. So we start to build that capacity so that then we can start looking at the beliefs that maybe-- the limiting type beliefs that have been driving them that are often set from earlier on in their life and the way that they were shaped. And that's often what we talk about as trauma. Not always a big event that happened on a single day, although that does occur, but the shapings that people had in their life that we're adaptive. People are very adaptive. And kids, and as they're in their formative years, will develop strategies to live life that adapt them in a way that they can survive the environments that they're in. And if that adaptation, which was appropriate in their family, their school, their environment, whatever it was, maybe all of those, was something that was more toward a survival response, like a fight or flight type response, and now that's never resolved in some way, and then later in life, they're still applying these adaptive strategies in situations that it's not appropriate for.

Andrew Huberman:
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. Now, I personally have been doing therapy weekly for well over 30 years. Initially, I didn't have a choice. It was a condition of being allowed to stay in school. But pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to one's overall health. In fact, I consider doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular exercise, which of course, I also do every week. There are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First of all, it provides a good rapport with somebody that you can trust and talk to about pretty much any issue with. Second of all, it can provide support in the form of emotional support and directed guidance. And third, expert therapy can provide useful insights, insights that allow you to better not just your emotional life and your relationship life, but of course, also the relationship to yourself and your professional life and to all sorts of goals. BetterHelp makes it very easy to find an expert therapist with whom you resonate with and that can provide you those three benefits that come from effective therapy. Also, because BetterHelp allows for therapy to be done entirely online, it's super time efficient and easy to fit into a busy schedule. If you'd like to try BetterHelp, you can go to betterhelp.com/huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com/huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Levels. Levels is a program that lets you see how different foods affect your health by giving you real-time feedback on your diet using a continuous glucose monitor. One of the most important factors in both short and long-term health is your body's ability to manage glucose. This is something I've discussed in depth on this podcast with experts such as Dr. Chris Palmer, Dr. Robert Lustig, and Dr. Casey Means. One thing that's abundantly clear is that to maintain energy and focus throughout the day, you want to keep your blood glucose relatively steady without any big spikes or crashes. I first started using Levels about three years ago as a way to try and understand how different foods impact my blood glucose levels. Levels has proven to be incredibly informative for helping me determine what food choices I should make and when best to eat relative to things like exercise, sleep, and work. Indeed, using Levels has helped me shape my entire schedule. I now have more energy than ever, and I sleep better than ever. And I attribute that largely to understanding how different foods and behaviors impact my blood glucose. So if you're interested in learning more about Levels and trying a CGM yourself, go to levels.link/huberman. Right now, Levels is offering an additional two free months of membership when signing up. Again, that's levels.link, spelled of course, L-I-N-K, /huberman to get the additional two free months of membership. The thing you said earlier that's ringing in my brain is, does it have you or do you have it? And I think for people listening and watching, I think this is a really important distinction.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And maybe you could just elaborate on how one starts to answer that question. Because these days we hear people are addicted to social media, people are addicted to sugar, people are addicted to all sorts of things, and online shopping, and on and on. Let's just set aside alcoholism for the moment because that's a unique case where, as you mentioned, immediate withdrawal can cause death, and it has its own kind of unique features. But for everything else, like if somebody out there is listening and they're like, "Well, I have a hard time clicking off of social media, even though I know I need to sleep, I need to study," or have a hard time disengaging from video games, I think is a common one in a lot of young people. How do they know if they're addicted? Is there a litmus test? Could we test ourselves as individuals? Like, can I go an afternoon without it? Can I go a week without it? Is that the test?

Ryan Soave:
I think that's a great test. Probably more than an afternoon or a week, but can I quit for a month? And when you've stopped, if all you're thinking about is either doing it or when you're doing it, all you're thinking about is how can I stop doing this? That's a pretty good indication that it has you. And you also have to look at what are the things that it's impacting in your life, and that's one of the things we can help people kind of orient to. And they might think that if it's somebody that comes to us that their family's saying this is a huge problem, they may not see it yet, or they may be avoiding it. We call that denial, but a lot of times there's something deep down where they know that, "I'm really disengaged from life. I'm lonely. I don't have the quality of relationships. I'm not able to be motivated to do the things that I want to do."

Andrew Huberman:
What if it still feels good to them, however? Like family isn't saying, "Look, kid isn't getting their schoolwork done." But It's kind of outrageous, four hours a day playing video games, three hours a day. That might not even seem like that much to a lot of people, but parents can see the opportunity cost of that. This is time that kid isn't running around and getting exercise. This is time that is eating into sleep. This is time that could be spent studying. So maybe grades haven't cratered yet.

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And we live in the, quote-unquote, American Dream model-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... where kids say, "Well, so and so makes millions of dollars every year playing video games."

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
"So I'm actually on the path." I think you see that fairly often these days, right?

Ryan Soave:
Yeah. I'll relate it back to drugs for a second. You and I are the same age, and you probably remember the this is your brain, this is your brain on drugs, when they showed the egg, this is your brain and-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Disrespectful to eggs.

Ryan Soave:
Right. Very disrespectful to eggs.

Andrew Huberman:
Which I'm a big fan of, but yeah.

Ryan Soave:
And then this is your brain on... Well, it did call the egg a brain, so that was pretty good, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, that's true. You're right.

Ryan Soave:
It said it was a brain.

Andrew Huberman:
Your logic is impeccable.

Ryan Soave:
Thank you. And this is your brain on drugs, and it showed the fried egg. I think that was a terrible example for kids, because most of the time when people do drugs the first time, it doesn't feel like that. It feels good. It feels great. It's over time when you keep doing that, especially a kid that doesn't have all of the responsibility and the things in life that they might have or want to have later on, they're not going to see that that's a problem necessarily. Because it does feel good.

Andrew Huberman:
Right, and some of their heroes are very public about the fact that they smoke a ton of high-THC weed.

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
When I was growing up, that was associated with lack of agency and kind of being a, quote-unquote, burnout-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... was the idea. Nowadays, there are just as many examples of people that smoke a lot of weed, are vocal about that, and by all external measures are doing very well, perhaps better than most.

Ryan Soave:
It also wasn't as highly concentrated when we were kids.

Andrew Huberman:
True.

Ryan Soave:
This is pretty intense these days and can have some really long-lasting effects on people. And there's some people that it's not going to affect in the same way it does others. Some people are going to be able to smoke that amount of THC or vape it or however they're doing it, right? The delivery methods are very... It's crazy these days because people used to have to roll a joint, go behind the store. It was like an event to go do that. Now you can-

Andrew Huberman:
And you had to break the law.

Ryan Soave:
You had to break the law. Now it's in a candy. It's candy, right? It's gummy bears.

Andrew Huberman:
Wild.

Ryan Soave:
It's really wild. And the thing with those people that are succeeding at it, when we really look at that, what percentage of the people is that, right? It's a very, very small percentage. Of course, kids are going to look at that and say, "Well, I can do that." I've had a conversation with my teenage son about that. And even if they're playing games four hours a day, I imagine those guys that win these video game, or they're the YouTubers that are making all kinds of money, they're approaching it like a pretty intense job. They're really working at it. But we don't want to take away that imagination and creativity from kids, but it's our job as parents to look and see. The kids aren't going to see what's happening. Their kind of timing is like now or not now. They're not really looking too far into the future, and that's a beautiful thing about being a kid as well. It's our job to put those guardrails on, and as parents, really understand what are the things that may impact them over the long term. But we also have to understand, it's easy for me to look at, I had video games when I was a kid, but it was Nintendo and-

Andrew Huberman:
Sega

Ryan Soave:
... Sega, and it didn't pull you in as much, and we were outside all the time. It was a little bit different. We'd come in and play video games at night. Now these things really pull you in, and you're interactive, and they communicate with other people. A lot of kids have their social connection out of playing video games. I actually had a mentor once who was involved in a leadership program with all these other adults, and they did their leadership program. They were all over the world, and they would meet in, I think it was "World of Warcraft" and play together, and they had different things that they would do to work through whatever they were doing in the leadership program. So there is some benefits to it for people. These kids can really connect with each other, and especially through the pandemic, this happened. I'm going to come back to what I was going to say about as a parent, it's easy for me to look at and say, "Well, there's too much social media. It's too much video games. It's too much this. It would be great if all that stuff was taken away." Well, guess what? It's not going anywhere. And I can't really relate to it in the same way that my kids will relate to it. I have younger kids that I have no idea what's going to be there when they're of age to look at screens or be in the world or communicate with others. But it's our job as parents to look at and get to know our kids in a way that we can see what are the things that are going to benefit them and what are the things that aren't. I don't think every kid shouldn't play video games.

Andrew Huberman:
No, neither do I. I think that the contrast with the video games that you played when you were younger, and then you mentioned going outside, I realize this is not a strict definition of addiction by any means, but if something in the electronic sphere makes, quote-unquote, real life underwhelming-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... I don't know if that means it's addictive, but it certainly means it has a gravitational pull, right? And we can set this as a kind of a pillar for context when we talk about pornography, for instance.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? There's a saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words," and I would say as a vision scientist that a movie, or even a reel, or a clip on TikTok is worth a billion pictures. Never before have we been exposed to so many movies with so much richness in sound and eyes. The more times we see eyes and you've got all this elaborate context of whether or not you're talking about pornography, whether or not you're talking about video games, the sort of sensory richness of it. Richness feels like the wrong word, right? But the amount of sensory information coming in through any one of those very brief experiences in a moment, it doesn't necessarily overwhelm the brain. Clearly, the brain can handle it. But then you walk out into a landscape, like a park with a couple basketball hoops and some paint drawn on the concrete and a ball, and it looks boring.

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
It's the difference between eating, as a kid, a hot fudge sundae banana split and then being offered a plate of broccoli. You have to know a lot about nutrition and care a lot about the long-term effects of nutrition on the body to not think that the hot fudge sundae is the better option. It just makes sense from a neural perspective. So I wonder whether or not this definition of addiction or habit-forming behaviors or dependence could be expanded to include the ratio of gravitational pull versus how it makes other things seem.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? And obviously, I don't believe that we should remove technology. I think technology's wonderful. But I could imagine that for a young brain and for an older brain, right? Can I just ask you, do you find any adults or do you encounter many adults who are addicted or have a habit of excessive online shopping? It's so easy-

Ryan Soave:
Oh, yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... to buy stuff online. Just the barriers to entry are so low.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew Huberman:
So does that make sense, this contrast between-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... richness and dullness that exacerbates the dullness the more that you engage-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... in some behavior.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah, and I want to be clear. While I said it's not necessarily a problem for everyone, I believe video games, as an example, can absolutely be addictive. There's been studies that have shown that it's impacting the brain in the same way as a lot of drugs are. I've worked with kids who video games were taken away, and their Wi-Fi was shut down, and they were somehow stealing some console and in the bushes near another home, somehow pirating their Wi-Fi to play the video games during the day. It sounds like-

Andrew Huberman:
Like an addict

Ryan Soave:
... like a crack addict.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah

Ryan Soave:
Or in the streets.

Andrew Huberman:
As a kid?

Ryan Soave:
A kid. It was probably a 15 or 16-year-old kid.

Andrew Huberman:
So they took away his Wi-Fi-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and video games, and he's hiding. I'm chuckling, but it's terrible.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You can only imagine what's going on inside that kid that they can't, as you've mentioned before, handle the discomfort of this thing that's like their medicine.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's the thing that makes them feel good.

Ryan Soave:
And we have these adolescent treatment centers, and these kids come in, and they'll be very dysregulated, even if they've been off of drugs, or usually, it's a lot of marijuana these days, and they start to clear up from that, but they're extremely dysregulated, agitated, reactive. And after sometimes three, four weeks, we start to see a completely different person. And one of the things I'm convinced is that they haven't been with their phones, they haven't been on social media, they haven't been playing video games. And I'm not saying the answer is to take that away, but you can start to see the impact that that has on them. They're so anxious about not being connected in that way or being, I would imagine, in that universe that you're talking about that's hot fudge sundae all the time. Who doesn't want to eat hot fudge sundae all the time?

Andrew Huberman:
Well, and then hot fudge sundae doesn't seem to taste so good then.

Ryan Soave:
No, then you need more hot fudge sundae.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. That's the dopamine dynamic stuff that, thank goodness, Anna Lembke, author of "Dopamine Nation"-

Ryan Soave:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... made so clear that those big, fast inflections in dopamine very quickly lead to smaller and smaller peaks in dopamine from the same behavior or substance, and then the trough of low that comes after is just immense. In fact, the other day, before I forget, there was a post on X of a guy. He sold his company for a billion plus dollars, and he was expressing the extreme depression of not knowing what to do with himself now. And everyone will say, "Oh, poor guy," right? I don't illustrate that point to make it a point about billionaires or not, but it wasn't the pursuit of pleasure, it was the pleasure of pursuit-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... that drives dopamine. He gets the goal. There's no more pleasure from pursuit because he's not pursuing anything anymore. And you think, "How could that possibly be? He can buy anything he wants." But the whole point is that the dopamine isn't deployed for the reward, it's deployed for the pursuit of the reward.

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
So that trough is a very real thing.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah, and in the trough, you're still not going to go back to a plate of broccoli. You're going to keep going after the hot fudge sundae feeling, even though the hot fudge sundae isn't giving it to you anymore.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, that's an extremely important point, that people are chasing a feeling. I had a friend who, thankfully, is a recovered addict. I obviously won't disclose who this is. A former methamphetamine addict, very successful in life, but had a serious meth issue.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Got sober and contacted me not long ago, requesting some support because they were thinking about abusing Adderall. And we had a conversation. Fortunately, they didn't do this. He's doing great, goes to meetings, has a sponsor, is taking care of that. But the description of why they were pursuing this idea of abusing Adderall was this recollection of a feeling. He kept talking about like, "I just remember that feeling. And everything felt..." And he was talking about something that I can't relate to because I've never done meth, have no intention of doing meth. But it's almost like it was a Like a love affair that had been spectacular, that he was missing this person, but it was a thing. It sounded like love, like, "I miss that feeling."

Ryan Soave:
I think that's a very important point, because I see people as having spiritual relationships with alcohol and drugs. They use them as something that makes them feel connected. They feel whole. What is alcohol called? Spirits. That it's something that can allow them, even if for a period of time, to feel the way that maybe they want to feel or not feel the way that they don't want to feel.

Andrew Huberman:
Can we dissect that a little bit? To feel the way they want to feel versus not feel the way they don't want to feel. I remember reading Augusten Burroughs' book, "Dry." He's a recovered alcoholic, and there's this paragraph in there where he talks about his first drink of alcohol, and I'm going to get the exact wording wrong, but it went something like, on that first drink, he felt-- He's in the first person, he's saying, "I felt it mesh with my blood and my physiology, and my physiology felt correct for the first time." And I thought, oh my goodness. I certainly don't have that relationship to alcohol, but I have friends who are serious alcoholics, fortunately now sober, who describe alcohol that way. From the first drink, they say, "This is me." It's like they're finding themselves.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And that's very different than avoiding the way they felt previously.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Most of them didn't pick up a drink the first time because they were trying to find that person or because they were trying to avoid something else. It was because there was booze at a party or booze at home.

Ryan Soave:
Even the people like him that are talking about alcohol like that, and I've heard this story thousands of times, from people that never read that book, that that's how they felt. They couldn't have been using it most of the time to get away or to move away from how they're feeling because they didn't even recognize that's how they're feeling. That was just the world they were in. Especially, a lot of times, this is kids and adolescents who that's the first time they're drinking, and they don't realize that they could feel the way that they're feeling.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Soave:
The way that we grow up are just the waters we swim in. We don't often know that there's a difference between who we are and how we can be. And to be able to, a lot of people, even the first time they'll do it, and it's not always like that for everybody, right? Some people just are using it socially and then later on when there are stressors, realize that, I can use this to medicate as well. But the ones that are having the relationship that you just described is, they didn't even know. They had no idea that life or their emotional state or their physiological state could be different than it was.

Andrew Huberman:
So how do you persuade somebody that it's a good idea to take that away from themselves? Because I imagine some of the first thoughts that go through their mind include, "I can't imagine life without that feeling."

Ryan Soave:
St. Augustine said, and I'm not going to get it exactly right, but he said something like, "Well-living depends on reordering your loves." And he was talking about people living with a disordered life. And the question it begged is, what are you loving the most? And his argument, I think, was, whatever you're loving the most becomes your god, your higher power. If I'm loving money the most, if that's the most important thing to me, then money is my higher power. The thing is, money will fail me, right? Like you just talked about. The guy could get a billion dollars and want to kill himself. Right? Or if I put my relationship at the, if I said, "The most important thing to me is that my wife is happy, and that's my most important thing," that sounds great, but she's not going to be happy all the time. And when she is, I'm going to feel great, and when she's not, I'm going to feel like I'm doing something wrong. Are we making sex the most important thing? And his argument was love God first and then do as you will. Find the highest power, because these powers that we're putting up there, like money, sex, food, all things that aren't problematic, we need them. They only become problematic when they're problematic, right? When we're making them that thing that's going to solve our problems.

Andrew Huberman:
What about kids? I know a number of people who are excellent parents who are super devoted to their kids, and they say, "My kids are my life. My kids are everything." That might just be language, right? They could also have a relationship to a higher power. But, do you see people suffering by virtue of over-emphasizing their kids or their, you mentioned spouse, but as a priority in their life?

Ryan Soave:
Yeah, and it's great that you made a distinction about just being language because people can say those things. Like, "My kids are very important to me." Probably, I would say, one of the most important things in my life is to be a father, right? But if the energy in the house, again and again, is that my kids are my life, what a burden that is for that child. That means that that child might, in those instances, show up in a way that they need to be happy, they need to perform, they can't show sadness. It becomes their job to make their parents okay.

Andrew Huberman:
And can you imagine that kid later, grown up-

Ryan Soave:
Looking for a partner and the expectation on that partner or the expectation on themselves just based on that role internalization of that they're the center of the universe or that maintaining this beam of love from the other person-

Andrew Huberman:
Right

Ryan Soave:
... is essential or else it feels life-threatening. Yeah, it's a covert form of abuse to use our children to meet our needs. We're there to meet their needs, depending on their age. You have an infant, you're their highest power. You have to do it. They can't survive without you. They can't feed themselves, and you carry them all the time. And then eventually they start crawling and walking, and you carry them more than you don't, and then eventually they're walking all the time, and you're carrying them just a little bit, and then you're not carrying them anymore. If you're still carrying them all the time when they're 16 or 17, that's a problem. But when we're using them to meet our needs again and again, now it becomes their job to care for us. And most parents that do this, and I see this all the time, are not setting out and saying, "I'm going to use my child to make me happy." They really have the best intentions, and it probably comes out of however they were shaped growing up and how their family was shaped growing up. But I see this with my kids. Sometimes I come home, I got two, they're six and three, and I come home from work and they're like, "Daddy, daddy, daddy!" And they're running to me, and they jump on me, and it feels amazing. And other times I walk in and they've got a show on or something, and I'm like, "Hey, kids," and they don't even say anything. Now, that doesn't feel great, but what I know is that doesn't mean they don't love me. If every day I came home and they were in the middle of something, I force them to get up and give me a hug, you do this once, it's not going to be a problem necessarily. But if I did that every day, and now I need them to give me a hug in order for me to feel safe and comfortable coming in the home or just feel happy, they're going to start having the job of, we got to hug Daddy in order for him to have a nice evening. And that's a big job for a little kid to have. And I see that play out a lot in the people that come to us in that they've unconsciously been assigned these roles in childhood like they're the hero of the family. We can use those, the terms, or the scapegoat. But really, what was the job that they were given? It's my job to take care of Mom and Dad. Maybe they were in the middle of the relationship, or if Mom and Dad are fighting all the time. But kids are often assigned these roles early on, and then they don't know how to shed them later on, and so then they just use that role later in life. My field is full of people who are assigned roles, the therapists and nurses and things like that. We want to care for people. But it's hard to parse some of that stuff apart, because we don't want to blame parents for how their kids end up, but when we're doing work with our clients, we want to understand the patterns that were developed, not to blame them, but to start understanding what were the systemic challenges in the family system so that we can develop and deploy systemic solutions for them.

Andrew Huberman:
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens. I started taking AG1 way back in 2012, long before I even knew what a podcast was. I started taking it, and I still take it every single day because it ensures that I meet my quota for daily vitamins and minerals, and it helps make sure that I get enough prebiotics and probiotics to support my gut health. Over the past 10 years, gut health has emerged as something that we realize is important not only for the health of our digestion, but also for our immune system and for the production of neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, things like dopamine and serotonin. In other words, gut health is critical for proper brain function. Now, of course, I strive to eat healthy whole foods from unprocessed sources for the majority of my nutritional intake, but there are a number of things in AG1, including specific micronutrients, that are hard or impossible to get from whole foods. So by taking AG1 daily, I get the vitamins and minerals that I need, along with the probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, and in turn, brain and immune system health, and the adaptogens and critical micronutrients that are essential for all organs and tissues of the body. So anytime somebody asks me if they were to only take one supplement, what that supplement should be, I always say AG1, because AG1 supports so many different systems in the brain and body that relate to our mental health, physical health, and performance. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman. For this month only, April 2025, AG1 is giving away a free one-month supply of omega-3 fish oil, along with a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2. As I've highlighted before on this podcast, omega-3 fish oil and vitamin D3 plus K2 have been shown to help with everything from mood and brain health to heart health and healthy hormone production and much more. Again, that's drinkag1.com/huberman to get the free one-month supply of omega-3 fish oil plus a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2 with your subscription. Today's episode is also brought to us by LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need but nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for optimal brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, are vital for the functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking LMNT dissolved in water makes it extremely easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of LMNT in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I also drink LMNT dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and therefore losing a lot of water and electrolytes. They have a bunch of different great-tasting flavors of LMNT. They have watermelon, citrus, et cetera. Frankly, I love them all. If you'd like to try LMNT, you can go to drinklmnt.com/huberman to claim a free LMNT sample pack with the purchase of any LMNT drink mix. Again, that's drinklmnt.com/huberman to claim a free sample pack. There's this thing that happens around any conversation about addiction where at some point, any logical listener starts to say, "Okay, well, and it sounds like everyone's addicted to something." And it's so hard to stay right between the lane lines of healthy, because I'm not speaking for myself because I'm not a drinker, but I like a drink at the end of the day. It helps me relax, makes me a better parent, makes me a better spouse, and I like it. Is it my spiritual higher power? No, but I like it. Would I take 30 days off? Prefer not to, but I'm not addicted. But then you think, okay, well, a kid that likes playing video games, it lets him connect with his friends. He's doing it a bit excessively, but is he addicted?

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay, obviously if it's harming people's profession, it's harming their relationships in very overt ways, then we place it into the category of addiction. But there's this thing that happens in these conversations around addiction where people start to go, "Okay, it sounds like I can't really enjoy anything that much because then it takes over everything." I'll come clean. I've worked anywhere from 10 to 16 hours a day, five to six days a week on average since I was 19. Am I a work addict? Workaholic? Maybe, but I love my work and it's done wonderful things for my life. And I have a life that I wouldn't trade for anything. Did I miss out on a lot of things? Probably. But I also love the life I've lived and that I continue to live. And a lot of that comes from the relationships and experiences I've had through work.

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
So, at some point, this is where diagnostic criteria become handy, but I do like the fact that we have a litmus test now. Could you take 30 days away from it and not completely lose your mind? Or could you just take 30 days away from it?

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
If I didn't work for 30 days, that would be very difficult for me. But I could do it. So how should we frame this thing of addiction, and so that people can ask themselves, "Do I have it or does it have me?"

Ryan Soave:
Yeah, I think how are you using it, and what is it impacting, if anything? But to be able to be honest with yourself about it. It's easy to say be honest with yourself about it, but it's very hard to be honest with ourselves. That's where being in a relationship with others, sharing what you're experiencing. If you're taking 30 days off, really communicating to somebody else, whether it's a therapist or a trusted friend, how am I thinking about this? Am I waking up every day wishing I could be doing this other than something? Am I sitting in a business meeting completely dissociated from what's going on because I'm really focused on that I'm not gambling or that I'm not drinking? You've got to be able to look at what it's impacting in the way that we're thinking and the way that we're feeling.

Andrew Huberman:
Can I ask you a question about how it's impacting things? Because one thing I've observed in myself and in others is that sometimes behaviors that if we were to just look at through a kind of tunnel vision, you'd say, wow, this person just works a lot, or this person exercises a lot. But it provides energy that feeds a bigger ecosystem.

Ryan Soave:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
It gives me a sense of purpose. I have great relationships through my work and relationships that are not through my work, but it sits not as my higher power, but kind of at the center of my life, and a bunch of other things wick out from it. And to remove that thing would be to disrupt the whole web. I think that's sometimes what scares people, especially, again, I can't relate to alcohol specifically, but my friends who have made the decision to try and quit or quit drinking alcohol, for them, it's like their ability to socialize, the lack of anxiety while they're intoxicated, knowing there's something to do for them, as opposed to what they would fill that space with. So sometimes I feel like these addictive behaviors fit into a larger ecosystem so that it masks any dysfunction. But it has this, again, gravitational pull so that it gets to bigger questions of how are we supposed to live our life? And I like this quote from St. Augustine, that "A life well lived is a constant reordering of our loves."

Ryan Soave:
Reordering of our loves, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Ryan Soave:
Something like that.

Andrew Huberman:
So it gets to these questions of what is a good life?

Ryan Soave:
This is a great discussion point, that people will come and say, "I just want to be happy. I just want to be at peace." First thing we have to ask them is, what does that mean? We have to define it. A lot of times maybe they're saying that happiness is kind of the absence of all this bad stuff. Or that peace is everything outside of me is going okay. Everything is fine. We've got to really explore with them, how would they know when they got there? A balanced life is going to be different for everybody. And especially with behavioral addictions, it's not about necessarily removing those forever. In fact, a lot of those we can't remove. Food addiction. You can't remove food. The things around sex addiction. I suppose someone could not have sex, but really a lot of that is about connection and relationship and love and intimacy. Even gambling. People don't have to gamble, but you're dealing with money, and you've got to touch it and spend it and be around it.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, buying a house is an investment.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah, or a gamble sometimes-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah

Ryan Soave:
... as we've seen. And we've got to look at how we're using these things. And going back to drugs, you look at we've got pain medication. Aside from being abused, right? We've got opioid pain medication. And then we've got heroin. And both of them either came from or are derivatives of the poppy, which is a beautiful flower, right? So we've taken this flower, and we've been able to make these drugs, and one of them Of course, prescription pain abuse and fentanyl that we see, it can be deadly. But I think an argument could be made that it's probably saved more lives than it's killed when used appropriately. We're able to have surgeries that we probably never would have been able to have before because of the medications that people can use. And then we've got people who are either abusing that or taking heroin and dying. When we started calling it the opioid epidemic, I think 50,000 people died. It surpassed the number of the people in the US that died by car accidents. Last year, it was something like 100,000, right? Where-

Andrew Huberman:
100,000 people died?

Ryan Soave:
At least. It's more than doubled. Now it's in a lot of different things. There's a lot of kids that are taking something that they think is a less harmful pill, like a Valium or Xanax, and it's got fentanyl in it, and they die. It's doubled since we started calling it an epidemic. And of course, that 100,000 doesn't include all of the other drugs and alcohol. But it goes back to how did we use it? We manipulated this flower in a way that we can save lives and kill or die. That's a more extreme example, but how are we using the things in our life? Are we using exercise as a way to completely dissociate from things? If I take away that exercise, am I going to fall apart? Am I not going to be okay? And that doesn't mean don't ever exercise again, but understand if I were to stop for a week, do I fall into a deep depression? Not everybody's going to do that, but if somebody's oriented in the way that it is a problem, that may happen for them. And then it begs the question, what am I using this for? What I think is so important about treatment for addiction and then recovery from addiction is that at first it's about eliminating something. It's about moving away from something. But that's not sustainable. Just to cut something out isn't-- Because it's being used for something, to give them that sense of relief or that sense of peace or that sense of connection, spiritual or otherwise. They've got to eventually start building towards something. What's the life I'm going to create? If you look at the 12 steps, the last part of the 12 steps is to practice these principles in all our affairs, which means go out and build a life. Don't find yourself really small. We were talking beforehand, there was a, I think he was a biophysicist. I can't remember. E.M. Jellinek, he was at Stanford for a bit at the end of his career, and he had done a lot of research on alcoholism and wrote a book in the '50s or '60s called "The Disease Concept of Alcoholism." And out of that book, there was a curve, and you can look this up, it's called the Jellinek curve. I don't think he actually created the curve. It was credited towards him. In fact, I think he even kind of dissociated himself from it, but it came out of his works, and it starts off with, at the top, and it's for alcoholism, where people start drinking, and it's in the crucial phase as they start drinking more. And at first, when people are drinking more, their tolerance increases, but they start to experience some problems. They're hungover. They're late for work. They're having arguments. But it's nothing that drastic. And as they keep drinking and descending down this curve, actually, they enter the, I think it's called the critical phase, and that's where actually tolerance decreases, right? They're dependent on it. They need it just to get by. They need it to get to work. They can't keep the job. They can't keep their relationships. Their physical body is starting to fall apart. They're getting sick because of it. There's a lot of other factors in it. And then they come down to the bottom of this, and it's this cycle of drinking and stopping and drinking and stopping. Drinking until I can't anymore. I'm physically sick, and then going back to it as soon as they can. When those people are able to get treatment and find recovery, now the curve starts to go back up, the recovery side of the curve. And in the beginning, they're not feeling that great. They've lost the thing that helps them get through life. But if they can stay in a contained environment, and that contained environment could be a treatment center or a contained environment like in a 12-step program, where they're engaged in something. I don't mean contained by the walls that you're in, but in a community, and they can stay away from it. Eventually, they start seeing that, they see in others that they can build a life, that they can go after the things that they wanted to go after, and they start finding pleasure from life rather than from the substance. They start to be able to handle the stressors of life. Their tolerance for stress, instead of their tolerance for alcohol building, their tolerance for stress starts to build. And then eventually, they're kind of moving towards what we would call in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the self-actualization. They're able to build a life that they never thought they could have before. You'll hear people say, "A life beyond my wildest dreams." And for a lot of those people, that's just that I'm able to meet anything with some sort of sense of peace, and when I'm not-- I think recovery is, it's not about finding a, let's just use the word peace. It's not about finding a sense of peace that you stay in. Balance is not I'm on both feet standing still. Balance is like this, right? And as we're taking risks in life as we should to really build awesome lives, sometimes we're going to feel way off kilter. But with the recovery process, to be able to recognize when I'm out of balance sooner or out of peace sooner and return to it quicker, recover again and again, and have the tools to know: What are the emotional conditions that I might be facing on every day and what are- What am I made of? And who am I that might bring to that? So for instance, something I give to a lot of my clients is, we call it the emotional weather forecast. The first part of this is they've got to really know themselves, and that's something that we see in 12-step a lot, where we hear if people identify their character defects. Not everybody I know is familiar with 12-step, but as part of identifying your defects, you're also identifying your virtues. Just like a balance sheet, you want to know your liabilities and your assets. And sometimes those things change. And if something that's a liability in this situation might be an asset in this situation, right? If uncontrolled anger and violence in my home when my kids do something wrong, and I'm not doing this, but it is a liability. If my family's attacked, it's an asset, right? So understanding what these defects and virtue or assets and liabilities are so that I really know myself, and that can be through a process of sharing with others. In the 12-step, that's how they do it. We do it in therapy all of the time to kind of know who I am. Actually, there's a line in one of the AA literature that Bill Wilson wrote, and he gives a definition of humility, and it goes something like this: that humility is an honest recognition of who and what we've become, followed by a deep desire to become who we can be. And it's not about that I'm all bad. It's just to note it, to recognize who I am. If I don't know where I'm starting, I can't know-- Just like finding directions. If I asked to get directions to the studio, and your team started giving me directions from over the canyon, but I was south of here, they're going to give me the directions to turn left on this road and right on this, and I'm not going to know how to get there. I'm going to be disoriented. I'm going to feel lost. It starts with really knowing where I am, who and what I am. And from there, then we can start to build a life. So one of the things I give people a lot is once they kind of understand these assets and liabilities of theirs, to look at each day ahead and say, first we start off with gratitude. It kind of gives a mindset. And gratitude just isn't about being thankful for things. I really believe gratitude is meeting what is as it is. When I give people this and when I practice it myself, I try at least to be one of the things I'm grateful for to be something that I'm challenged by. And not just to say, I'm going to learn a lesson from this, but I might not know what that is, but to really express gratitude for some challenge I'm having. So that's kind of a mindset. And then the next thing is just laying out your plans for the day. And not like a detailed calendar, but I'm going to take the kids to school, go to work, travel, have a business dinner tonight. Right? So I kind of know what's happening that day. And then from there, look at what's my emotional state currently? What am I experiencing now? Especially if it's like fears, resentments, anger, guilt, shame. It could be something else. It could just be like I feel really solid today. But when I can take what's going to happen today and what I'm already experiencing, I can look at what I'm doing today and think, there are some character liabilities or defects that might come up. If I have to travel today and I've got to take three flights instead of one, I can know that if I know myself, I might say I have the ability to become impatient, controlling, and look at my day to almost predict what are the emotional disturbances that can happen that day. And then coupled with the state that I'm in. If I'm already upset about something else, I've got a higher likelihood of going into these reactive patterns that I don't necessarily want to go into. And so much like going on a trip where I would look and see what the weather's going to be. If it looks like it's going to be rainy the whole time I'm there, I'm going to pack a raincoat. Now, that doesn't mean I'm not going to get wet, but once I start getting wet, I can go get my raincoat and put it on. Same thing in this. The last part of it is to look for what I'm going to watch for because of my plans and my emotional state. Now, I know that I have to watch for being maybe short or controlling. I want to watch for these character defects or liabilities. And then what do I want to strive for? I'm going to strive for being patient, tolerant, kind. Now, just because I write this down, just like the rain jacket, doesn't mean I'm not going to experience these things. But when I can look at a day as an example, I can break it down and in a chunk where I'm not going to be shocked by I'm being impatient. And as soon as I get impatient, I can remember, oh, this is what I want to watch out for today. And I wanted to strive for being tolerant and patient. So then I can use one of the tools that I might have that I've laid out. It might just be if I'm in the airport, walk away, take a breath, and recognize and remind myself, this is what I'm striving for today. And in this exercise, we're putting out in front of us what we might be experiencing based on what we know about ourselves and what we've learned about ourselves. And when we can do that, we can start living each day a little bit better. Or at least I find this with my clients, that they can chunk it down and say they're not surprised by these emotional reactions. And like I said earlier, I try to help people learn how to feel bad, to recognize that, okay, I'm feeling disturbed. I'm in a reaction. Let me lean into it rather than run away from it. And we run away from it in different ways. I might be snapping at the lady at the counter or

Andrew Huberman:
Might be someone that now I just totally withdraw and don't say anything.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah, numbing out is very common.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, it is.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I just want to repeat these different categories. A small list of gratitudes, including perhaps some things that we're grateful that challenge us or-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... things that we've received or whatever it happens to be, a quick list of gratitudes. Plan for the day. What the internal emotional weather is, like how am I feeling?

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Irritated, rested, whatever. It could be three or four things. What to watch for and what to strive for. I do think it's an extremely useful, obviously zero cost, minimal time investment protocol, for lack of a better word, that everyone, not just people who struggle with addiction, but everyone can benefit from. Because I think we tend to be so conscious of what to look for, what to strive for, coming out of a morning journaling or a great night's sleep, but then it's amazing how by 3:00 PM somebody cuts us off in traffic or we're being bombarded with too many things, and all of a sudden we're not necessarily unpeeled, but we're not our best self. Do you think there's value in sharing your list with somebody else? Connection with others is so important, especially when I share something like this that's vulnerable with them, because it's not just about holding me accountable, but now I'm expressing it in a way that others see it, and we can have communication with them about having them share back with you, too. I have 10 guys that I share this with every day. And not that the way that I do things is the way that everybody should, but I ask other people that I give this to to share it, because you're now expressing it, and expressing something kind of brings it more into existence than if I'm just doing it myself internally. And we've got to put these things in front of us because we will forget very quickly. Or like you said, coming out of a morning journaling or meditation session feels great. I think most people decide to make a change on one day, and then they don't think about it again in the way that they thought about it for months. Like happens every year on New Year's. They're not putting it out in front of them every day to be a reminder of what I'm going after, what's important to me. And the brain is very different at different times of day and at night. One thing that I subscribe to that, separate from this conversation but perhaps relevant is, I don't believe any thoughts that occur between 2:00 AM and 5:00 AM. I just don't. Whatever comes up, if I happen to wake up in the middle of the night, I've chosen to not believe those thoughts. I might write something down, I might have an insight that I'm interested in, or something that terrifies me or whatever, but I just don't believe those thoughts because I've had the experience thousands of times of then going back to sleep, waking up in the morning, being like, "That's ridiculous." That doesn't hold any water anymore. I think we're so vulnerable in the middle of the night. Our forebrain's shut down. We can't strategize. All our safety mechanisms are at their lowest, and those thoughts just don't hold meaning. Now, that's not to say that some night owls might not have some brilliant insights in the middle of the night, so this just relates to me and my schedule. But I do think that we can make a decision to behave one way and do things at 8:00 AM, and by 4:00 PM, as a neuroscientist, I can honestly say that your brain is not the same brain at 4:00 PM that it was at 8:00 AM. It's still you, but it's functioning so differently. What's important, how it orders priorities, how it interprets data. It's not like a computer. It's a dynamic machine, and at different times of day, you're working with a different set of hardware. Literally, certain circuits are more active than others. So I don't believe that we are capable of self-regulating nearly as well as we could, certainly not perfectly, if we don't have a reminder of our best self, our aspirational self that we carry forward. Whether or not it comes through other people or enforcement or ideally comes from inside us. But the expectation that we are going to spontaneously and impulsively be our best self is one of the biggest failures, I think, of education, and psychology, and medicine. And evidenced by the fact that I have many colleagues who are scientists and physicians who have terrible addictions. Some are sober, some are not. These are brilliant people who have all the knowledge in the world about the inner workings of the mechanisms-

Ryan Soave:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... that make people addicted-

Ryan Soave:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... et cetera. Anyway, I'm editorializing there a bit, but I feel very passionate about these zero cost tools. But I have to say, these tools can make a huge difference. And what do you call this list? What is it? The plan for the day? What is this list?

Ryan Soave:
Just like an emotional weather forecast. Call it whatever you want.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Soave:
But I think it can be part of a daily inventory, too, where at night you could look at it and see how you did. I think you just talked about being your best self. It's a way to kind of define what our best self is that day. Because what our best self is is going to change depending on the circumstances we're in. I've run into problems before in my own life where it's the weekend, and I'm really looking forward to, and let's say I don't do this extra because it's a Saturday, and I'm home, and it's going to be an amazing... I live with four other people, three of which are children. They might have other plans. Or someone gets sick, and we can't go to do the thing that we were going to do, and I can find myself really grumpy and right in those character defects or liabilities. I also think being your best self isn't never engaging in those. It's not never getting angry.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Ryan Soave:
I remember a teacher I had was talking about, and I can't remember, he was talking about some Indian yoga master, that the student asked them, "Do the masters ever get angry?" And he said, "Of course. But when they get angry, it's like writing on water. It's there, and then it's gone." They're not holding onto it.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Soave:
If you try to write on water, those letters are going to disappear right after you write them. There are emotional disturbances that we're going to have, and it's part of life. We can't ignore them. We should embrace them and lean into them. I think a real secret to having a really fulfilling life is being able to embrace all aspects of ourself, the light and the shadow. Because we can't just try to run from the shadow and go to the light. They're hand in hand. In fact, they don't exist without the other.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, because they're both inside of us.

Ryan Soave:
And they're both inside of us. And they both have their purpose.

Andrew Huberman:
What is the purpose of the shadow in your mind? And for folks that don't know, the shadow, we're using Jungian language here, but, and there probably will be some folks listening that say, and are thinking to themselves, "Well, I've never suffered from an addiction," et cetera. But what we're really talking about here with this, can we call it an emotional weather map?

Ryan Soave:
Sure, that's great. Thank you.

Andrew Huberman:
Because I like the idea of a map and the forecast component.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Because it's not just how do I feel right now, it's how do I feel right now, what's coming, and how am I going to prepare, and there's some goal setting in it, but you're not actually writing out your specific goals, just-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... what am I striving for, is, I suppose, a goal. But what we're really saying is anyone that's ever gotten anxious, anyone that's ever gotten stressed, anyone that's ever gotten angry, whether or not you yell or not, right? What you're talking about is a roadmap for being able to navigate the experience of being human.

Ryan Soave:
Right, because what we're striving for is not our specific goals. I'm not striving for success in this meeting. I'm not striving for making this money today. I'm striving for ways of being.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Soave:
How I'm going to be that day in the face of the stressors, whether that meeting goes well or not, whether I make the money or I don't, whether I get the answer that I wanted or I don't, that I'm striving for this way of being. There's a line that I heard from a country singer once that I think he heard in a 12-step meeting that said, "Peace is not finding calmer seas, it's building a better boat." How are we going to navigate the storm, not how are we going to avoid the storms?

Andrew Huberman:
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Function. Last year I became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. Function provides over 100 advanced lab tests that give you a key snapshot of your entire bodily health. This snapshot offers you with insights on your heart health, hormone health, immune functioning, nutrient levels, and much more. They've also recently added tests for toxins, such as BPA exposure from harmful plastics, and tests for PFAS, or forever chemicals. Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to your physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from top doctors who are expert in the relevant areas. For example, in one of my first tests with Function, I learned that I had elevated levels of mercury in my blood. Function not only helped me detect that, but offered insights into how best to reduce my mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption, I'd been eating a lot of tuna, while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC, N-acetylcysteine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification. And I should say, by taking a second Function test, that approach worked. Comprehensive blood testing is vitally important. There are so many things related to your mental and physical health that can only be detected in a blood test. The problem is, blood testing has always been very expensive and complicated. In contrast, I've been super impressed by Function's simplicity and at the level of cost. It is very affordable. As a consequence, I decided to join their scientific advisory board, and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try Function, you can go to functionhealth.com/huberman. Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman podcast listeners. Again, that's functionhealth.com/huberman to get early access to Function. You alluded to this earlier when talking about balance as a dynamic process, not a static process, that part of peace is knowing that when distress comes, you'll be able to tolerate it.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
As opposed to there's no distress. And I know people like this, that are constantly trying to move through the channels of life, create their own little estuaries around things so that there's never any disruption.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah. We want to be able to tolerate that distress enough to make choice and respond rather than react to whatever it is. It doesn't mean that we're not going to navigate out of the storm. I think of it like this. If we go back into the, I don't know, 17 or 1800s when the only way to get from England to America was to navigate or to sail in a wooden sailboat, sail ship, whatever it was called. And let's say we took the most experienced sailor with the best ship. But this time, rather than using his skills of navigation and sailing, he said, "The seas are calm and the weather's good, I must be going the right way. But if the seas are rough and the weather's bad, I must be going the wrong way." And every time the seas were calm, the weather's nice, he just kept going in the direction he was, but every time he came across waves and rain, he'd turn. Is he ever going to get there? Potentially. Let's say it's calm the whole way. Or he might end up navigating all the way down around South America and then coming back up. Neither one of those is the answer. The answer is that when he meets the storm He can use his skills of navigation as a sailor and understanding the weather and his experience to say, "Okay, this is something I navigate through. This is something I navigate around." But he doesn't just react based on the external conditions. And we react constantly to our external conditions based on what we're perceiving is going on.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Soave:
I'll preface this by saying I think, I believe one of our biggest, if not our biggest challenge as human beings and our psychology is that we confuse discomfort with threat and respond to discomfort as if it's threat. And this goes back, I can use the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, not that everybody that experiences this has PTSD, but when you look at the diagnostic criteria in the DSM-5, which is the most recent version of the diagnostic manual, it says that the person was exposed to death, actual or threatened death, or actual or threatened violence, or actual or threatened sexual violence. In the DSM-4, it said real or perceived. And what that means is, we can have a similar or exact reaction to something that is actually happening, like you're attacking me, hopefully you're not going to attack me, but like you were, as if you threaten to attack me. If I believe that I'm in danger, then I'm going to have the same fight or flight response or the same reaction in my body as if I am actually in danger. It's interesting that I think our legal system recognizes this, in that you can be arrested for assault or battery. Battery is you hit me. Assault is you threaten to hit me or threaten to kill me. We actually, in a way, recognize this idea of perception in our legal system. It's also, I believe, what the, forgive me for saying it in this way, but the, quote-unquote, "success of terrorism" is. It's not that this event happens, it's that we leave that event thinking, it's not that those buildings came down, it's that we believe that all of the buildings are going to come down, right? It's terror.

Andrew Huberman:
I think that because we were talking about addiction and now we're talking about perception of threat and distress, I want to make sure that we tie those things back to one another. No, I think this is a very important conversation because at the heart of addiction, but also at the heart of a challenged life, challenged in the ways that life shouldn't be challenging, is this lack of distress tolerance.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I have a question about distress tolerance, specifically. What can we do to increase our distress tolerance? Like what practices? Maybe we just have to experience distress to know how to navigate distress.

Ryan Soave:
Well, we're going to experience distress. We experience it all the time, and you may be able to articulate this even better than I can, but I think we need to look at stress, right? Not all stress is bad. We need stress. I need stress to move around in this chair. I need to be able to walk around. My muscles need to tense, and I need that stress. Was it Hans Selye's work around eustress and distress? We're going to experience distress, and it's not about avoiding distress, it's how are we going to walk through that distress. And so I like to break practices down into a couple different ways. So proactive and reactive. Proactive are going to be things that we schedule. You talked about yoga nidra. We can talk about that a little bit more, the non-sleep deep rest, other forms of mindfulness and meditation that actually allow us to raise capacity in our nervous system. Going to therapy, coaching, being involved in a community, doing physical exercise. These are things that we're going to schedule. Going into the cold plunge, which does allow us to experience something and stay a little bit longer, and it gives us... We have one at home, and when friends come over to use it, it's so funny because the first time they're going to do it, and I know you've had a lot of people. I was at your home a couple of years ago, and there was a guy who was doing it for the first time, and he was like a big, I don't remember this, but he was like a big athletic guy, and he was freaking out getting into-

Andrew Huberman:
He was terrified

Ryan Soave:
... Terrified, right? And it's just cold water. It could hurt you if you're in there for however long to get hypothermia, but it's not going to hurt you. So having practices like that allow us to move through that level of fear can translate to fear or distress, can translate when it comes in real time for something that I know I can walk through this.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, because adrenaline is ubiquitous in stressful circumstances, which is just a bunch of science nerd speak for the stress response is always an increase in autonomic arousal or alertness, a shrinking of the visual field, an increase in heart rate, a tendency to move. People will say, "But I freeze." Actually, the freezing response, this is kind of interesting. My lab studied this. Lindsay Salay published a paper in "Nature" about this in 2018. She was a graduate student in my lab. The freezing response is an active behavior.

Ryan Soave:
Oh, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Trying to hide from an intruder in your home in the closet, you're trying not to move. So people think, oh, people freeze under stress. No, the freezing response is an active response. The adrenaline dump, as it's sometimes called, is what essentially creates the freeze response. It's why people can't remember things when they get up on stage if they have a fear of public speaking. And I forgot to mention in the cold plunge, cold water is a highly reliable way to elicit an adrenaline response.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's just a great training for, this feels uncomfortable, I want to get out, but I'm going to learn to control my thinking in this uncomfortable circumstance.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah. So that would fit into the proactive, right? So that's something that you can proactively start to be able to manage that adrenaline, as you're telling me, in the body, right? We're able to manage those feelings, because what does it come down to is these sensations in our body that we're experiencing that feel really uncomfortable.

Andrew Huberman:
And we might be able to sense them a little earlier-

Ryan Soave:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... if we have some training. I just want to throw in one little science tidbit as long as we're talking about using cold as a way to manage distress tolerance, is that the first 15 to 20 seconds after the adrenaline response hits, and it hits very fast, your forebrain, which is involved in all your contextual decision-making and clean, clear strategies of what best to do, is essentially shut down for about 20 seconds. If you can make it 20 seconds-

Ryan Soave:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... you have a far better chance of not doing something really stupid and doing something that's very adaptive.

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Now, there may be circumstances where you don't have 20 seconds. But if under stress and riding out that 20 seconds is generally going to be a very adaptive approach, because then your forebrain comes back, quote unquote, online, and you can really start to make strategic decisions based on those particular circumstances.

Ryan Soave:
Right. And so that's what's happening when we get experienced, some people say get triggered by something that's uncomfortable for us. You get a text message from your boss or your partner that says, "We need to talk later." A lot of people, I don't know about you, but when I get, "We need to talk later," it's not my favorite text in the world to get. So someone might get that text, and then they immediately go into their perception or their beliefs or their narrative about what that means. "I'm going to be rejected. This is going to be disappointing. It's going to be really hard." And those perceptions or beliefs are coming out of their past. So now sitting there looking at a text message, which is really just a neutral... All events are neutral. We bring the meaning to them, and we want to bring meaning to them, but it's just words on a screen, and we don't even know what it means yet. You're looking at those, and you're not even in the present that more, you're in the past. And we're never really out of the present. People say, "Get present." That's the only place we live. It's where are we oriented?

Andrew Huberman:
Past, present, or future.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Ryan Soave:
In this moment, now that I'm going into this narrative from all the other times that I was, let's say, I'm making up that I'm being rejected or I'm not going to get what I want. Now I'm oriented to the past. We can say I'm disoriented in that moment.

Andrew Huberman:
Or to the future. You're anticipating what might be said, what's going to happen.

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
You're out of the moment.

Ryan Soave:
But I would say that the anticipation is still something that's coming out of what we've experienced-

Andrew Huberman:
Sure

Ryan Soave:
... before, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Ryan Soave:
And then from there, we go into an automatic reaction, and it's like a fight or flight response. It might not seem like that because we might not be thinking, "I'm going to die from this." We might be thinking, "I'm not going to be okay." And what is, "I'm not going to be okay," that gets carried out, and it's triggered in the body, I would say, in the same way as, "I'm at threat. I'm in danger." And this is where we're confusing discomfort, because even if I am going to be, "Not going to get the answer I want," or, "I'm going to be abandoned," it's not life-threatening. It's not actually threatening. It's perceived threat. But I respond to that perceived threat as if it's actual threat. And I might respond by going after the person, like, "I need to know right now," being obsessive about it. I might respond by withdrawing completely and hiding from it. But it creates this cycle of an automatic reaction to things that doesn't allow me to build tolerance for that stressor. The solution to that is first be aware that that's happening. And once you're aware that that happens, and it happens to us all the time, once I recognize that I'm in this cycle below, to find a way to stop, to intervene on that, to take a break from it. It might be just those 20 seconds. It might be taking a few breaths. It might be walking away from it.

Andrew Huberman:
Can I interject something there?

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Because one thing that stemmed out of a prior conversation we had is I think, these aspirational responses of, okay, the stressor hits, I'm going to create the gap between stimulus and response that, was it Viktor Frankl or something like-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... referred to. It sounds wonderful, but in real time-

Ryan Soave:
It's very hard

Andrew Huberman:
... everything's different.

Ryan Soave:
It's very hard.

Andrew Huberman:
Everything's different. And so, what can we do to prepare? What are the things? I like this notion of proactive tools that we can schedule, cold plunge being one of them. We'll talk about yoga nidra and some other things. But one of the things that I've learned is that there are sensations in the body that come about, and it will be different for different people. But there are sensations in my body that come about very fast because the adrenaline response is fast. And the more that I pay attention to those-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... the more I'm able to pick up on them at earlier stages of the stress response. Kind of like seeing a big wave coming-

Ryan Soave:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... from further out. And the yogis talked about this. I learned about this also from you, that in meditation, we can start to see the quote, it's mystical language, but the subtle ripples of our perception. Whereas when we're going through life and we're just kind of around-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... it's like being on a train, and we're just seeing stuff go by all the time.

Ryan Soave:
I think the concept is stilling leads to seeing.

Andrew Huberman:
I love that.

Ryan Soave:
The more that we can still the mind, the easier we can see what's actually happening versus what we perceive is happening. So what you say is so true that it is hard if the first step is to, after we recognize that this is something happening, is to stop when we're in the middle of a response, how do we stop? Something that I work with the people, and I actually heard you talk about in a different way that I really appreciated in one of your Essentials podcasts, where in that moment, when we're in that reaction, the sympathetic nervous system has been activated. The solution, though, is not to deactivate the sympathetic, it's to activate the parasympathetic So our practices and tools that I think are the most beneficial is how do we activate the parasympathetic?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Soave:
A great question to ask ourselves once we recognize that we're in some sort of stress response, I like to tell people to ask, "Am I or is anybody around me in immediate physical danger?" And if the answer is no-- First off, if I can ask that question, it's probably the answer is no. But most of the things that we experience every day are not life-threatening. Actually, probably the thing that we experience every day that's most life-threatening, that doesn't bother most of us, is driving in a car, right? And we're hurtling down the road and just trusting that someone's not going to cross over that other line. But that won't scare us. But getting someone that you're in a committed relationship with or that you're emotionally attached to that says something you don't like might throw you into a spiral.

Andrew Huberman:
It speaks to the unbelievably powerful aspect of human connection.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Likewise, with the earlier example of the kid in video games, we think about this kid and the video game as the only players in the interaction. But to take a video game away from a kid is to also remove him from his social context.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
We know that social isolation is one of the most potent stressors for any mammal, especially humans.

Ryan Soave:
From what I've read, tribes would basically shame someone out of it if they did something really terrible. They would send them out of the tribe, and that was like death. They only survived together. Now we can live alone because of technology and human advancement, live physically alone. But we're not at the top of the food chain, really. If we were out in the jungle or back when we were nomadic, and we still have that within us, that we need that connection. We need that.

Andrew Huberman:
So we're talking about distress tolerance.

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
We have an emotional weather map tool that can prepare us. There are things that are proactive, like cold plunge or meditation. In the moment, we can hopefully create more of a gap. And of course, we were talking about this in the context of addiction, but as you were saying, with the behavior or the substance is the medicine against discomfort.

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Can you go back to that theme just a little bit to really hammer that home? That when somebody comes to you, initially, you're saying, "Okay, what are you using? How often are you using? How is this impacting your life?" Trying to get them to see all that. But once they move past that, are you trying to get them to see what they're really afraid of? Let me frame this a little differently. Many years ago, you said, "It's kind of incredible." We were having an academic discussion, and you said, "It's kind of incredible. If we can tolerate discomfort for one second, then we can tolerate it for two seconds. If we can take discomfort for two seconds, we can do it for five seconds. Once you start to realize that all you have to do is experience discomfort as a series of moments, suddenly you realize that you have an immense capacity to manage discomfort." And I was like, I sat with that for a long time. Why do you think it's so hard for us to do that, even though, in theory, that's exactly how it works?

Ryan Soave:
I think this is where we get hijacked by the part of our nervous system that is kind of binary and looking at it's life or death. If we perceive this as danger, it's going to respond as danger. We don't want that part of the nervous system, and we don't want it having discernment. We want it really, when we're actually faced with... Say if you and I were walking across the road here and a car's about to hit us and you see it. I don't want you to stop, breathe, meditate, have compassion for the driver. I want you to react immediately, push me out of the way. Even if we get hurt and break a leg, we need to live. The problem happens when I go home, and I say something to my wife and she disagrees with me, and I react to her like she's a car about to hit me. It becomes an appropriate response at an inappropriate time. We don't want to lose that. And so it becomes so hard because we're in this, I believe, this fight in our nervous system to say, one part of it's saying, "You need to act or you're not going to be okay," and the other part's saying, "I don't want to keep doing this." In your mind, I know that I'm in this room or in your lab with virtual reality goggles on, but that one part of my body thinks I'm falling when really I'm watching a video game.

Andrew Huberman:
So maybe the best we can do is prepare. These proactive tools seem increasingly important to me. Can we talk about Yoga Nidra?

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I talked about non-sleep deep rest a lot on this podcast. Yes, I decided to take Yoga Nidra, which is a thousands of years old practice, and rename it non-sleep deep rest because I wanted more people to do it.

Ryan Soave:
Thank you for doing that.

Andrew Huberman:
I've taken some heat, but I wanted more people to do it, and it's a zero-cost tool that I think is very valuable. I learned it from you. I went out to where you work and observed that this is the first thing that people do every morning when trying to get sober. This is the first thing that you have them do every morning when they're trying to identify and overcome their traumas, including full-blown PTSD. And I don't want to share some of the stories that people shared out there, but a couple of them were very intense. When I'm talking about PTSD, I'm not talking about had a bad semester in school. I'm talking about people who were co-sleeping with their kid, and the kid died.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And it was a very intense thing to hear those stories, and it was also a beautiful thing to see people's transition through their traumas, in some cases, their addictions, or both. And every day started with an hour of Nidra. What is it about Nidra? How did you discover Nidra, and how did this come about? Because I think it's an extremely important tool for a number of reasons, but how did you start incorporating this into trauma and addiction treatment?

Ryan Soave:
I was working at a place in Central Florida, and near there, it was a treatment center, and not far from there, there happened to be an ashram started by an old Indian guy who had come over from India in the '50s or '60s. He's in his 90s now and is credited as one of the people to bring yoga to the West. One of many. It was the Amrit Yoga Institute, and they were running some workshops, and I ended up doing a training there. That opened a door for me to start doing some other things. I'd been practicing breathwork, and this was all part of my own journey. And then got introduced to Yoga Nidra, and it was just a very powerful tool. And in these workshops that I was in, I saw some pretty amazing things happen for the people that were taking trainings. We were there for, I remember we were there for, it was a 10-day training, and you could take it as 10 days, or you could take five days and then come back for five days. And there was a woman who had been there for a five day and was coming back. And when she was there at the first part, she was a single mom. She had two boys. They were probably under 12, and she was completely stressed by them. Like completely stressed. She could not almost handle being a mom. And she practiced this. She decided to come to this training, and then she went home, and it was several months in between. And when she came back, I remember in the opening group, she shared that she'd gone home and had not changed anything. The only thing she did was practice Yoga Nidra, I think twice a day, in the morning and the evening. And she's like, "My boys changed." And I actually don't think the boys probably changed at all, but she was someone who was filled with anxiety and stress, and the kids were picking up on that, and she wasn't able to tolerate the discomfort or distress of her children or boys just being boys. I don't even think they were really probably behaving more than an eight- and ten-year-old does differently, but she couldn't handle it. And now she was able to build this distress tolerance by practicing this meditation. And Nidra means sleep, so it's a sleep-based meditation.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Do you want to just briefly describe what it looks like?

Ryan Soave:
Generally, what it looks like is first a person lays down, and ideally, they'd be laying on their back unless they can't lay on their back, but you lay on your back and get in a very comfortable position. It's a guided practice, and one of the reasons it's guided is it becomes a technique that disappears the technique. And what I mean by that is if you're sitting doing meditation, and you're doing something where you have to focus on a mantra, this is not an exclusion of that. But when you're doing that, you have to focus on that mantra. So sometimes having to focus on something can bring you out of it. And in those practices, bringing you out of it is beneficial, too, because you want to be brought out of it, and then you can find ways to get back into it, it being the meditative experience. So you're laying down, and there's generally a series of, I'll say physical movements. It's not like yoga doing stretching. It might be something like tensing and relaxing your muscles. It might be something like massaging your face as you're being guided through this to kind of just relax the body. And after a certain point, and in a lot of the teachings that when I do it or I've been taught, there's a certain point at which all movement stops, and you just want to follow the person's voice. In Yoga Nidra or Nidra, we set an intention. An intention might be like, "I'm at peace with myself as I am in the world, as it is." Something like that, something that you want to bring in or a state that you want to experience. I know that you distinguish, I believe you distinguish non-sleep deep rests like Yoga Nidra without intention.

Andrew Huberman:
Generally, without intentions or mystical language.

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
It involves the I think the most critical part of non-sleep deep rest in Yoga Nidra to me, the overlap in the Venn diagram includes self-directed relaxation.

Ryan Soave:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
The ability to do that, which of course, the incorporation of long exhale breathing will facilitate that-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... because it pushes down on that side of the seesaw that is the parasympathetic nervous system-

Ryan Soave:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... and really gets it engaged regardless of how stressed you are, as you pointed out, getting that parasympathetic nervous system. The idea that people's mind can be active, but their body is still, I think is a very powerful state. You're not trying to fall asleep, so the end goal is in reach for everyone.

Ryan Soave:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
It isn't like you're going to fall asleep. It's like, actually, you're going to not fall asleep. If you fall asleep, it's okay, but-- And actually, sometimes people think they're asleep-

Ryan Soave:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... but when I'm guiding them, and I'll give a direction to roll over on their side at the end, and they do it-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... but they thought they were asleep.

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
What we believe is happening in that is that they're in the brain states of sleep while still being awake. Once they're in that relaxed space after doing some movement in the beginning, or the space to be relaxed and still, I should say still versus relaxed, still physically, is through different breath exercises, specifically ones that have long exhales. Right? Like you said, it activates the parasympathetic nervous system. And then

Ryan Soave:
guiding them through their body in some way. So it might be, there's one called 61 Points where you identify all these different points in the body, starting with the forehead, down to the pit of the throat, and then at all different parts from your shoulder down to your fingers, and then all the way down to your toes. And people being able to move their awareness in their body gets them away from that thinking and doing into the more feeling and being. They're putting their awareness on their body rather than everything external.

Andrew Huberman:
One of the great strengths of doing Nidra or NSDR, as it were, is that we take ourselves out of the prediction mode, and we can experience life unfold in real-time moments. It sounds so mystical, but actually it was Josh Waitzkin who was on this podcast, the former chess prodigy, martial arts champion, et cetera. On the Joe Rogan podcast, he said something that I wanted to share with you, which felt appropriate now, which was, he said there are two ways to go through life. One is, metaphorically speaking, as a passenger in the dining car on a train that's going 80 miles per hour, and you're experiencing what's in that train, and you're seeing things go by. That's the non-conscious-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... lower way to experience life, lesser way to experience life. Where you want to be is strapped to the front of that train, safely, experiencing space and time as they're happening, flowing by you and through you as a series of moments. And I really think I credit Nidra and NSDR with an ability to see life unfold as an observer and still have the ability to participate, so you're not dissociated, you're not stepped back, you're not ahead of yourself. You're right where you need to be.

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Does that capture it?

Ryan Soave:
I believe so. I might take the train example a little bit different direction, where I always will say it's like you're either on the back of the bus and you're being driven around, or you're driving the bus.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Soave:
It's not that you're just on, and he may not have been saying this, but just not on these rails experiencing it like this, that you have control, autonomy, and have the ability to be authentic. And authentic in a way not... Authenticity gets thrown around and people are like, "I just am who I am." Well, most times when people are doing that, and they're just acting however they're feeling in the moment, they're not who they are, they're who they were, or they're acting out their past experiences. Authenticity in the way that I'm talking is more like auth is the same as in author, right? It's like authorship, that you become the author of your life. That you're able to write the story going forward because a lot of what we're doing before that is just plagiarizing from our past, stuck in the cycles of our programmed reactive patterns that came out of the ways that we were shaped. And things like Nidra, where we can start to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, again, distinct from deactivating the sympathetic, and be able to pause and be able to look at choice. In that cycle I was talking about earlier, where we're being reactive, the first thing is the stop. Well, how do we stop? It's by building these abilities to have this distress tolerance, even if it's for a few seconds, and take a moment to be able to get present, and what I mean by that is look at what's actually happening. This isn't every time someone's sent me a text message, or every time someone's ever abandoned me or disappointed me, or every time I've been afraid. It's just this one moment where I get a text that says, "We need to talk later." And from that, now that can break the cycle enough that instead of automatic reaction, I'm in choice, and I'm making a choice out of all options of how I'm going to handle this. Now, it might still mean that I go, "Could we talk about it now?" in a text response. But that would be very distinct from sending 20 text messages in rapid succession saying, "What do you need? Why are you doing this? Am I in trouble?" Whatever it is we're saying. But you've been able to move to the front of the bus, and now you're driving it, right? Instead of being at the effect of life, you're being at cause.

Andrew Huberman:
I feel like most people learn how to control their body, but most people don't know how to control their mind, meaning they don't know how to control their thinking.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah. And there's a great line in a Indian text, it's called the "Atma Gita," I think it is, where it says something like, the end of the saying is like, "Man thinks his enemy is out there, but really, the man's uncontrolled mind is his only true foe." I don't know if we need to garner complete control over the mind. I think the way to do that is to be able to find ways to relax back from what the mind is doing and saying, and like you said, ignoring the thoughts between 2:00 and 5:00. I think there's a lot of thoughts that we have that we can ignore. Our thoughts are not fact. It's this input that I'm getting, and we tend to grab onto the thoughts that I think that we've had before that have helped us survive situations, even if the way that we've survived those situations is to cause destruction. We know how to live. Example would be someone who's in an abusive relationship again and again, right? I've never met that person that said, "I can't wait to get in the next relationship, so it's abusive." It could be a man or a woman. In this case, let's say it's a woman. Maybe the only men that she was around growing up were controlling or abusive, and she had some experiences with men who were very similar. And then That's the environment or the waters that she started to swim in. She knows how to survive that kind of man. Or if you're a man, that kind of woman. And even if they want that relationship that's loving, caring, kind, and patient, no conflict or not that type of conflict, even though they want that, when they get into it, it doesn't make sense because they've never done it before. They're still going to be potentially relating to that person with these past reactive patterns. I always say this when my wife and I, we have a great marriage, and great marriage also includes disagreement and argument. It also includes love and connection and all of that stuff. And when we're in an argument, it's almost like I'm not talking to her and she's not talking to me. It's like my past is talking to her past, and her past is talking to my past. When we can stop and get out of that cycle for just a moment, then we can make a choice that will move us toward the direction that we want to move. And that choice can seem risky because if we haven't done it before, or let's say that that choice might go against everything that we've developed in order to survive the situations that we've come out of. So now, instead of arguing, I'm going to be vulnerable. That's going to feel very scary.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Lori Gotlib, a psychologist, was on this podcast and saying, and I totally subscribe to this, that people are more willing to stay in a bad situation often, something that's not adaptive for them because it's familiar versus stepping into something that could be better for them.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Clearly better for them, and they can understand that cognitively, but they somehow cling to what's familiar. I think that's just the way our nervous system is wired. Like you said, staying in the battles, repeating the battles that are familiar to us, that we know how to win.

Ryan Soave:
We just, instead of authoring something new, we're plagiarizing from our past just again and again.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I love that phrase, plagiarizing from the past, even though it's something to avoid. How often should people do Nidra or NSDR, and when? What time of day?

Ryan Soave:
I think I've told you this before. Probably the best time is to do something in the morning-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Ryan Soave:
... and in the late afternoon. Second-best time would be in the evening, and third-best time would be any time you can. So, it's not easy. It could be anywhere from 20 to 35 minutes. So it's not easy for people to find that time based on the schedules they have. But set a time that you're going to do it. When we schedule and have proactive tools, we don't know if we're going to need them in that moment. What it means is, regardless of whether I need it or not, I'm going to do it. It's like I tell people about therapy and coaching all the time. The second-best time to get therapy is when you're in crisis. The best time is when you're not. That's when you can grow. So scheduling proactively will allow us to either maybe solve a crisis that we're in or help us have the tolerance in that moment. Like I wake up stressed, and I'm able to then do this practice, and then I'm not stressed, or I wake up not stressed and I'm able to do this, and it helps to build the ability for me to drop back into that state. Because I think as we practice things like yoga nidra, we're able to more quickly move from a dysregulated state to a regulated state. I don't know if you've had that experience.

Andrew Huberman:
Definitely. I think of stress and alertness and calm, all of it, as the autonomic nervous system.

Ryan Soave:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Parasympathetic being calm, calmer states, sympathetic being more activated states, and I think of it like a seesaw. And I think when we're asleep, we're mostly parasympathetic. When we're very stressed, we're mostly-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... sympathetic. So it's the balance. But the way I think about things like nidra is as a person on that seesaw, you are that person and you're learning to press on one side. And when you're stressed, the hinge of that seesaw is very tight, so it's hard to activate the parasympathetic much more than when you come out of sleep and you're still a little bit relaxed, perhaps. And then it's easier to push on that. So you might find that learning nidra is easier then. There's always value to learning how to work both sides of the seesaw. And actually, sometimes we need to know how to ramp up the level of stress, as in the case with the cold plunge. We're deliberately activating the sympathetic nervous system, and we're saying, "Aha, but I'm doing it as this kind of person surfing on the seesaw, and so I know how to balance here, so that when I'm there again, I recognize this place." So that's kind of how I think about it.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah. And also, I have found in practicing yoga nidra or non-sleep deep rest, that it makes other practices easier. That when I want to do a five-minute meditation. And one of the things that I think is super valuable for people is to proactively schedule these times that you're going to do longer periods of rest or a practice, but also recognize there might be things that you can do for a minute or two minutes.

Andrew Huberman:
This is what Pavel Tsatsouline, who is a world-class strength coach who was on this podcast, talks about greasing the groove. You want to get good at pull-ups? Do two pull-ups every time you walk through the doorway-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... from a pull-up bar. I think metaphorically speaking, the workout in the gym, people think of that as the endpoint. But actually, we used to do physical labor as a species. So I look at the workout in the gym as the ability to lift boxes on moving day, to move furniture without getting hurt.

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
I love going to the gym, but it's not an end in and of itself. Same thing like a long run is the ability to go hiking with friends without having to train for it and not worrying about-

Ryan Soave:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... gassing out halfway through.

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
So I think that these practices are preparation for real-life stressors.

Ryan Soave:
They're a gym for your mind.

Andrew Huberman:
They're the gym for your mind. And we don't talk enough about emotional fitness, and the world is clearly metabolically ill with obesity, diabetes, et cetera. But we are also dealing with a massive mental health crisis that I do believe stems primarily from an inability to regulate this autonomic nervous system thing. Because we can say, "Well, sleep's The foundation of mental health, which it is, and physical health. A lot of people have trouble sleeping. How to get better at sleeping? Get better at relaxing. How to get better at relaxing? Yoga nidra and SDR. Yeah. And then, so I feel like the tools exist, and I'm so grateful that you pointed me in the directions of these tools, and it can be very simple. One of my teachers used to say that the breath is the mind made visible, and if you want to change your mind, change your breath. I mean, of course, do a yoga nidra. It might take 30 minutes, right? But if you're in a moment where you're feeling really activated, change your breath, specifically a long exhale. I love that breath is the mind made visible. That's beautiful and so true. That was Amrit Desai. I should give him credit. Okay. Wonderful. It's the quickest way to create an activation of the parasympathetic nervous system. Quickest way. And this is where people will think meditation is so hard, breathwork, which there's many different forms of breathwork, are hard, which they can be, I suppose, hard in the way that we've got to find the time, and it can be uncomfortable, but I'll tell people, "Take a minute and breathe." And if even a minute sounds long, take seven breaths. Who can't take seven breaths at any point in the day? You're going to do it anyway, right? We never aren't breathing. But if we can bring our attention to that, and you can schedule that like, "I'm going to do that before I get out of the car to go to the office. I'm going to do it before I go to lunch, after a meeting, before a meeting." Or you can just say, "Any time that I'm feeling like this, I can take seven breaths." It might end up being two minutes, like a TV commercial. And those things add up, and they build on each other. And the more that we practice those, the more that we do raise that capacity to experience distress. First, it helps us activate that part of the system and teaches us, like your analogy in the gym, but we also start building a habit around doing something like this so that we can weather whatever storm's coming, and we start to orient toward it. I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Waking Up. Waking Up is a meditation app that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga nidra sessions, and more. I started practicing meditation when I was about 15 years old, and it made a profound impact on my life. And by now, there are thousands of quality peer-reviewed studies that emphasize how useful mindfulness meditation can be for improving our focus, managing stress and anxiety, improving our mood, and much more. In recent years, I started using the Waking Up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice. Many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits, but many people also have challenges keeping up with that practice. What I and so many other people love about the Waking Up app is that it has a lot of different meditations to choose from, and those meditations are of different durations. So it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice, both from the perspective of novelty, you never get tired of those meditations. There's always something new to explore and to learn about yourself and about the effectiveness of meditation. And you can always fit meditation into your schedule, even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to meditate. I also really like doing yoga nidra, or what is sometimes called non-sleep deep rest, for about 10 or 20 minutes because it is a great way to restore mental and physical vigor without the tiredness that some people experience when they wake up from a conventional nap. If you'd like to try the Waking Up app, please go to wakingup.com/huberman, where you can access a free 30-day trial. Again, that's wakingup.com/huberman to access a free 30-day trial. People are probably starting to realize that overcoming addiction is about more than just white-knuckling it. It's about more than just going to meetings, although that can be very useful. It's about having a roadmap of the day, having a plan, knowing what weather patterns to look out for internally and externally. It's about having a way to deal with distress, having a way to calm down. Let's talk a little bit more about specific addictions. Okay. Maybe I'll mention a couple different categories of addiction, and maybe you could reflect on some of the unique features of that in your experience. Not necessarily neurobiologically, but in terms of strategies for confronting, in oneself, those things. Right? Like strategies for trying to overcome them. Because I hear from thousands of people, really, about different addictions in themselves and people close to them. So let's start with alcohol. What is unique about alcohol addiction that people should know? And these could be extensive answers. They don't have to be. Right. But that could be helpful to them. Alcohol is an interesting one. I think alcohol and most drugs have a lot of similarities, although alcohol tends to be the one that is the most socially acceptable. Drinking is part of our culture. If you don't do it, you catch some flak sometimes. Oh, yeah. I think some of that's been changing, and some of it thanks to you. I can't tell you how many people that I've ended up talking to because they listen to your podcast on alcohol. Just from a health standpoint, so people are starting to look at that. It's less like the "Mad Men" '50s people drinking at lunch, but it's still very much part of the culture- Happy hour ... in everything. Happy hour, happy day. Look at the- Sunday fun day ... if you've ever been in one of these retirement communities, where people are retired and just drinking all the time or- Really? Oh, yeah. There's a real stigma to not being able to drink for people. I don't mind sharing. I've been sober for quite some time, and

Ryan Soave:
That was a challenging thing, like the first wedding I went to or the first work event that I went to. I didn't know how to talk about it with people. Now, it's no big deal. It doesn't bother me at all. And if it does, sometimes I don't like to be around people who are just getting wasted, so I'll leave the wedding at 10:00 instead of 2:00. Most of the people thought I was there till 2:00, but I left at 10:00 because they're doing whatever they're doing. But it's very challenging because having a glass of wine at dinner or a beer after work or thinking about people, it was always a thing like the first time a dad and a son share a beer, there's a lot of romanticizing around it. And I don't think alcohol is evil. I think listening to what you've talked about, it is poison, but like anything else, in moderation, I don't think it's a terrible problem. I'm not anti-alcohol, but what is it doing to you, and what are you using it for? So I think what the good side of that being part of the culture is when people can find a community, like a 12-step community or some other sort of peer community where people aren't drinking, that is really what helps them a lot. They're not alone in this. And I think the movies and TV do a terrible job representing what 12-step meetings are like. It's usually like they show a circle in a church basement, and everybody's talking about how they can't drink that day. I'm sure you've seen that in television, right? And in reality, of course, that happens sometimes, but most people are there really trying to use that program as a design for living and to build really amazing lives. When you look at the 12 steps when it comes to alcohol, alcohol's only mentioned in the first one. Everything else is about how you live your life. That first step is about admitting we are powerless and that our lives have become unmanageable. And powerlessness is actually an awesome concept. People will look at powerlessness and think, "That means I'm weak. That means I can't control my life." But really, defining where you're powerless is the first step in finding great power. Because if I just keep going out every day and I start fighting a battle that I'm going to lose every single day, and even if it wasn't addiction, like every day I just go out and I am taking on the five biggest guys on the block when I'm a kid, I'm going to lose that every day. I'm not going to start winning until I realize I can't beat them in the way that I'm doing it, so go do something else. Powerless, where we identify where we're powerless, then we can go find great power, and that's where the concept of higher power comes in. And higher power to a lot of people is God and whatever their concept of it. Sometimes higher power is just the group of people in the community. I will see that anywhere from the relationship with God to me and you talking is a higher power. Two heads are better than one. I'm going to be able to reflect to you, and you're going to be able to reflect back, or I'm going to share with you, and you can reflect back to me and help me see things differently and shift a perspective. Because a lot of our healing is just a perception change. I'm just going to see things a little bit differently than I did before. So that community and the ability for them to be in service to each other and help each other is, I think that's the antithesis of, "I'm part of this drinking culture." And that's not only unique to alcohol, but because there's not usually a socially acceptable, you don't see crack advertised on television, right? You see alcohol, and it's in everything. Now, we do see gambling on television quite a bit, which is incredible.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, let's talk about gambling. I like the way, by the way, that you frame alcohol. It's being offered to us all the time after a certain age, and so it's a challenging one for people that are challenged with alcohol addiction or alcohol use disorder. And 12-step, I think is, it's free, it's in every city, it's a powerful program. And certainly, there are data, I should just mention this, I think people will hear, oh, it's a cult, et cetera. There was a study, actually, run at Stanford some years ago. We'll provide a link to the coverage of that study and the study, which took a very objective look at 12-step for the treatment of alcoholism and other substance addictions. And actually, the investigators, the people that ran the study, were very skeptical going into it, and the results were pretty remarkable.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And they changed their initial perception coming out of it that it can be very, very effective for people, especially given that you can do it when you travel, you can go to meetings in other cities. And as you mentioned, it's not the depressing picture that people think of a bunch of people-

Ryan Soave:
No

Andrew Huberman:
... whose lives are destitute in a basement. Sometimes people are coming in with some hard stuff, but there's often a lot of humor.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
There's a lot of common challenge. There's a lightness there that a lot of people might not anticipate.

Ryan Soave:
People taking on life, not hiding from it.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Love that. Gambling.

Ryan Soave:
Not everybody that gambles has a gambling problem, just like everything else. But when it does become problematic, it's a very challenging disorder to treat. I don't know where the study came out of it. At one point, I had seen some research that said that the highest rates of suicide were among gambling addicts.

Andrew Huberman:
Oof.

Ryan Soave:
And what I've seen with that is it's like their whole world starts to get really small. It's weird because in the way that I look at it, it's really the only addiction, if it's an addiction for that person. Not everybody that gambles is a gambling addict, but for the ones that are addicted, it seems to me to be the only addiction that the next hit can solve all your problems. So you're down $300,000, you could bet that and win it. I don't think anybody really thinks, in the moment they're probably out of their mind, but they don't think, "If I shoot heroin, my life is going to get better in the long run." They might be thinking, "It's going to get better right now because I'm not going to get sick. I'm going to feel good." Whatever it is for them. But they're not thinking that this is going to solve their problems. They know it's not. And so it fortifies what we were talking about before, is continuing to go after the hot fudge sundae, except they can get it. And it's interesting because I've talked to different people, and sometimes the hit isn't in the winning, sometimes the hit is in the losing for them.

Andrew Huberman:
Really?

Ryan Soave:
I've had people tell me that. I don't really understand that, but I think then they have to go back after it again.

Andrew Huberman:
I believe them. They're the ones suffering from it, but wow.

Ryan Soave:
And it's becoming a real problem with kids. There's a lot of sites to gamble on now. They can bet on a lot of crypto sites. You can bet on anything. And kids are playing in these online casinos that are probably operated overseas that are not regulated at all, and casinos that are regulated become very wealthy winning on a very small margin. I'm sure these casinos don't ever lose. They're making it up. It's in our face all the time. I was reading Willie Mays died recently, the baseball player, San Francisco Giant, before we were around. But he was banned from baseball for life, I think they ended up letting him back in, because he took a contract from, I think it was Bally's. He wasn't betting on sports. So this was in the '80s. He took a contract because he would go there and meet with their high rollers once a year for a week, just play golf with them, hang out with them. He wasn't betting on baseball, and he got banned from baseball. Now, you watch a baseball game or go to a baseball stadium and different betting sites are mentioned all over the place. You watch any sporting event and it's out there. And that's not the only thing people are gambling on, but I don't know, if you watch sports right now with the basketball on or the Super Bowl was on, it's showing people with a phone showing that there's a celebrity on there winning $186,000, I think the number was. And then couple that with kids that are pretty susceptible already looking at those unicorn type people that are making millions on YouTube playing video games or starting to-

Andrew Huberman:
Professional poker players.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah, professional poker players or even ones that aren't gambling that they're out there and they became a creator and they're making millions of dollars a year by having people follow them, like there's a way to make a-- Their significance is going to come from making a lot of money really fast, and then they see this way to do it without having to work or anything like that, and it's rigged to lose. They're going to lose.

Andrew Huberman:
Dopamine without effort.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That's the danger. I've said it many times on this podcast, elsewhere, too. It's like any high, rapid inflection in dopamine that doesn't require effort, aside from being a kid and your parents get you an ice cream or it's your birthday. All you did is you were born, and to get those presents, and you deserve that. It's your birthday, great.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But in life, dopamine that doesn't require effort to obtain is the slipperiest slope.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah. And the gambling for the kids and adults, but it's not just on betting on what we might traditionally think of betting on, a sporting event or something like that. We see it in cryptocurrencies. There's nothing against cryptocurrencies, but people going into it without any knowledge or any sort of sophistication and just putting all their money in it and up and down. We see more sophisticated people doing it as adults in real estate investments or-

Andrew Huberman:
Stock market

Ryan Soave:
... stock market, or owners of company taking big bets on things. And it doesn't mean that there aren't people that are taking calculated risks. I'm talking about people who are day trading when they-- And there are people that day trade and do great, but then there's a lot of people that see this person day traded and great, and then they do it and don't do so great. Their lives collapse.

Andrew Huberman:
So are you seeing more people coming to you with gambling addiction?

Ryan Soave:
Yes. It's not always then the primary thing, though. There's a lot of people that are coming in with substance abuse or substance use or alcoholism, and we find out that they're also doing that. The thing is, people addicted to gambling aren't always seeking treatment. By the time that they are ready to, they might not have the money for it. They might not have the job with the insurance. And if we are talking about insurance and treatment centers, there's not really a benefit for long-term gambling treatment. You have to kind of look at the anxiety and depression around it, and sometimes they get put in with people who are suffering from anxiety and depression, and we're not really focusing on the specific gambling issue. We also see people that they stop drinking, and they're able to stay sober that way, and they haven't really organized and ordered their life in a way that they're building towards something, and that energy from the addiction of alcohol or drugs goes to Gambling.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. We'll talk about a few other patterns of addiction and types of addiction, excuse me. But this idea that when you remove the quote-unquote medicine, there's a lot of distress and discomfort that comes up for people.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And some people are able to white-knuckle it, as it's called. Some people can develop tools to try and work with that distress, become more distress-tolerant. Some people will transmute distress.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Sometimes, yeah, it goes into running ultramarathons, which doesn't necessarily mean that-

Ryan Soave:
No

Andrew Huberman:
... it's an addiction, but I've seen, and we know some people who got sober and stayed sober basically by running a lot.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
A lot, a lot.

Ryan Soave:
But do you think that that increased VO2 max allows for ability to handle distress better?

Andrew Huberman:
Sure. I think that running can calm the mind over time. Runners who run a lot, most of them are pretty tired or a little bit tired.

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And maybe that's part of the solution. If you have a dog that needs a lot of physical movement, you put it into a small space and it doesn't get a chance to run around. You see this in zoos, and animals develop these, what are called-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... stereotypies, like where you see the lion that's cutting literally a trench in the dirt. It's really sad to see. That animal is designed to roam, and you give an animal the opportunity to expend this energy that's stored up in its mitochondria, and it does, and it can relax, and it can sleep. They still have to do the work of getting sober, these people, but moving your body through space is a way of transmuting energy out of the body. So you come home, you're like, "Relax." You eat a meal. There's a calming effect to endurance activities.

Ryan Soave:
For me, nothing changes my mood and nervous system better than even a 20-minute run. I think they're also getting the benefits, if you're walking or running, you're getting the similar benefits to what people get from EMDR. Just the natural movements of the eye. In fact, EMDR, which is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, the woman who discovered it, discovered it by going for a walk and realizing when she put something that she was distressed by in her mind, at the end of the walk, she felt better.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Francine Shapiro, she was in Palo Alto, walking behind Stanford when she made that discovery. As long as we're talking about this, it's funny that this is coming up, because online behavior, gambling, looking for somebody to get drugs from, the foraging is where the dopamine is released.

Ryan Soave:
Oh, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
We were talking about this earlier. And foraging mentally is the same from the perspective of the dopamine system as foraging physically through space. Think about what the dopamine system evolved for. It's like any animal, including us, searching for water, searching for food, searching for mates. We rest at night, but it's the movement forward through space that satisfies that dopaminergic system. And in fact, the major, I don't want to go off on too much of a tangent here, but the major system for movement in the body, not just reward and motivation, is dopamine.

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
That's why people with Parkinson's lose dopaminergic neurons-

Ryan Soave:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... and they can't generate smooth behavior anymore. And it's interesting that Nidra and NSDR, the most impressive study in my mind-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... is the one that shows these big increases in dopamine-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... from resting. So I feel like physical movement-

Ryan Soave:
It was like a 65% increase in-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah

Ryan Soave:
... endogenous dopamine or something like that.

Andrew Huberman:
It's incredible.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
There's something about still body, active mind that ramps up our dopamine stores and then prepares us for movement.

Ryan Soave:
Does the dopamine store get ramped up when we're sleeping?

Andrew Huberman:
Yes.

Ryan Soave:
Anecdotally, they'll say that a 30-minute yoga nidra is equal to about three hours of REM sleep. I don't know that that's true or not, but-

Andrew Huberman:
It's hard to equate, but-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah, of course, but I'm just saying anecdotally.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm. But it makes sense, and I think, yeah, there's some truth to that basic statement, or basic truth to that statement. I think that transmuting just the energy that would otherwise become distress, or that starts-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... as distress. Like when we're stressed, we need to get that out of our body. And I think that drugs like cocaine and amphetamine, big increases in dopamine, then crashes, you're essentially dispelling the energy. I'm not so sure that it's always about pursuit. Like you said, it's like the gambling addict that actually wants to lose. There's something about-

Ryan Soave:
I don't know if they want to lose, but they recognize that they felt that-

Andrew Huberman:
That was the hit

Ryan Soave:
... or they felt one there. I'm sure they felt it when they won as well, but-

Andrew Huberman:
Well, when you're really low, the only place you can go from there is up. When you're really high, the only place you can go from there is down.

Ryan Soave:
Down. Yeah. This is so important because I think, what is discomfort? What is the distress we're experiencing? It's not our thoughts. We don't feel our thoughts. We feel our feelings. They call them feelings, right? Because we feel them. What are we feeling? We're feeling some sort of sensation in our body.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. It's energy.

Ryan Soave:
It's energy. Which is energy. And when we're feeling that energy in an appropriate situation, like I'm feeling intense adrenaline and excitement when I'm going on a rollercoaster that I like, and I'll pay money and stand in line to do that. If you wake up on a Tuesday morning in your bed and you start feeling that, it's anxiety, fear, desperation. It's still just energy in our body. And everybody will experience things differently. I could probably ask you, because you've got insight, if you're experiencing anger, where it is. If somebody asks me, I can experience that in a hot belly, like heat between my eyes. My shoulders feel really tense. If I'm scared, where do I feel that? I feel like an emptiness in my stomach and a kind of tension in my body. People can name it, and sometimes just naming it what it is versus ... kind of running through, like, "I'm anxious, I'm afraid." Instead of saying, "I'm anxious or afraid," being able to go, "Well, my heart's racing. I'm feeling tension in my shoulders."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Ryan Soave:
Talking about the experience. And the goal isn't always just to dissipate it, but we can be with it, because the idea that I'm anxious and I can't get out of it then causes more anxiety.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm. That's right.

Ryan Soave:
And so these practices, anything that we can build where we just kind of lean into the discomfort a little bit and then lean out, we start to build capacity. We pendulate through kind of activation and resource, until we have a larger range of motion.

Andrew Huberman:
What about, and I'll bundle these, things that really hit the dopamine system hard? Like in your observation, cocaine, amphetamine being the most salient ones, Adderall, and other stimulants. Is there something unique to those addictions that you see in people that come in that give them kind of special requirements for how to overcome those addictions?

Ryan Soave:
Yeah, it's interesting. I think up until some time in the '80s, and I'm not going to have this right, I think they didn't really see cocaine as addictive because you didn't become dependent on it-

Andrew Huberman:
Really?

Ryan Soave:
... like you would heroin or alcohol. Yeah, somebody wrote a book called, I think it was Dr. Gold, "1-800-COCAINE," where they were starting to see that we could classify addiction as a psychological addiction. I might have that a little bit off, but I think it's somewhere in that neighborhood. There's not a physical detox from stimulants like amphetamines or cocaine like there is from heroin, opioids, or alcohol and benzodiazepines.

Andrew Huberman:
Coming off stimulants is really hard.

Ryan Soave:
It's really hard.

Andrew Huberman:
It's really hard.

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Ryan Soave:
But there's a obsession of the mind that gets triggered, and it's this psychological addiction that they can't seem to get out of. I would imagine that you could probably describe it in what's happening with the huge surge in dopamine and then dropping off of it. I'm not sure exactly where it falls in that, but they used to think that people couldn't recover from crack cocaine addictions.

Andrew Huberman:
That's what we were told. You do it once and you're addicted. I don't want to say that's not true, but there was no real evidence for that. It's just smoking crack, aside from shooting cocaine, like intravenously, leads to the fastest increase in dopamine. It's the rate of increase is just as important as the peak.

Ryan Soave:
Right. In working with those, there's a lot of energy that goes into just having them kind of still. I think a lot of stimulants, I see it as they help the physical body kind of match with the internal state of the nervous system. I think that's one of the reasons we see stimulants work for ADHD. You probably understand the biological reasons of it. It seems to me that it kind of levels out their experience. I've seen people that when they take stimulants, they get really calm.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, having a mismatch between your brain level of activity and your bodily level of activity is really rough. So let's talk about some process addictions. These days, I hear a ton of really desperate stories, mostly from young guys. I've heard from maybe four or five women on this, but literally thousands of young men about porn addiction.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Every time I hear about it, I feel so fortunate that I grew up in a time where, or maybe I just don't have the wiring for it, and if I did, I'm pretty open on this podcast, it's never been an issue for me.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And they're telling me that they can't stop watching porn. I get the sense that they're not enjoying this experience anymore, because they're reaching out to me saying, "How in the world can I quit?" And what do I tell them?

Ryan Soave:
I remember, and again, I don't know this study, but I remember somebody referencing many years ago when I was first getting in the field that porn addiction at the time, specifically related to video pornography, which is what it all is now, right? It was having the same impact on the brain in young men as crack cocaine. It's extremely powerful. Has a lot of other effects in that it sets up a very unrealistic idea and perspective of what sex and intimacy is. It also can help, or can lead to kind of setting their sexual template. They can quickly escalate, just like you would escalate, kind of back to the hot fudge sundae, where it doesn't work anymore, from something that might seem like normal sex to violent sex to really out there things that can bring a lot of shame that they're even watching. And it can escalate quickly. And then have an impact on their own lives and relationships, because they're playing out those relationships or that amount of intimacy, depending on what they're doing, also if there's masturbation along with it, in a fantasy.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, what I'm also hearing is that any time they are in a real-life intimate scenario, which seems to be fewer and fewer times nowadays-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... in the younger generation, that they are having sexual anxiety, sexual performance issues. Which makes sense if their brain and nervous system is getting wired by porn to observe sexual behavior as opposed to being in the experience of-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... intimate sex behavior, right? Two different things to be in the experience versus watching someone else's experience of it.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Which is what pornography is.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah. This was probably 10, 15 years ago, where we were treating a lot of soldiers that had come back from Afghanistan or Iraq, and this was the first wars where they had access to the internet. And there was a lot of other things. So there was a lot of combining of sex and violence, right? They're around a lot of violence, and then they're watching sex, and then that kind of sexual template would set around, like in order for them to get pleasure out of sex, it would need to be aggressive or even violent or very risky. So there's all these things that kind of collapse together. There were other things going on. It was the first time that they had also really had access to video chats to be able to be on a battlefield and then come back and be talking to their spouse about something that's going on with the kids. It was very confusing environment for those guys, men and women. The porn addiction is a tough one, because it's everywhere. Now you can find it on any social media almost. Maybe not anyone, but it's not really limited. And even if it's not, I know certain states have just put in where you have to put in your ID to get it, but there's tons of ways around that and other sites that people can go to. And I've run into that with a lot of, it does seem to be young men. And it's a way for them to play out some sort of fantasy around connection and relationship, and it makes their world really small. I don't think it's the same as gambling, but it can make their world very, very small in that they're, instead of finding relationships out in the world, and it's not necessarily a relationship, but what they believe they're getting out of a relationship, they're then getting out of watching porn.

Andrew Huberman:
It seems like basically stopping completely is the answer. And I'm not trying to moralize here, right?

Ryan Soave:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm not telling people what's moral about this. I just know that any behavior or substance that leads to quick, repeated inflections in dopamine is going to create a groove in the nervous system where you're going to crave that thing, and it's going to give you a lower and lower sense of satisfaction over time. And the only way to reset that circuit is to stop and do something else in its place, ideally, that's adaptive.

Ryan Soave:
These are people that are asking you how they can stop. They're telling you, "I can't stop. How do I do it?" So it can be similar to other addictions. First, the admission part that it's a problem or awareness it is, and then being able to start to talk to somebody and start to take some accountability around it. Not accountability like you're doing something wrong, but to be able to have some sort of, identify the behaviors that start leading to that. That can be done in therapy. There's other 12-step groups that can help people with that to identify what their sobriety would look like, if you want to call it sobriety, what it looks like. And if it does involve not watching any porn, then that's the rule set that they have, and then they figure out, either with their therapist or in their treatment center or with their sponsor or community in 12-step, like, "How am I going to be held accountable to that?" And that might be doing the things like we talked about, laying out, looking at your day ahead. At the beginning, they might need to look at things like, there's ways and software out there to not be able to look at that on your phone or have an accountability partner that they have to approve websites you go to, and that's not to say that they have to do that forever, but it's something that's available, right? 50 years ago or 30 years ago, someone had to find their dad's porno mag somewhere and then look at it. Now it's on their phones or computers.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, we know that increasing accessibility increases addiction.

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
This has been studied over-

Ryan Soave:
Over and over

Andrew Huberman:
... and over again, and people say, "Well, what about red-light districts and things?" And there's some caveats that have to do with when you create areas within cities where certain things are allowed.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But this has been tested many, many times.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's also true, and it's kind of a duh, but to quote Ana Lembke, "It's impossible to get addicted to a substance or a behavior that you've never taken or engaged in."

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
So some things are best avoided-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... entirely. Are there specific 12-step programs for porn addiction that are separate from, say, sex addiction?

Ryan Soave:
If people look it up, I'm sure there's meetings out there that are specific to that. There are some treatment centers that have tracks that deal specifically with that. There's therapists that work very closely with that, and I believe that there are some 12-step. There's pretty much 12-step programs for any sort of, within things like SA or SLA, there'll be subsets of meetings for people that are with a very specific condition.

Andrew Huberman:
And one of the reasons I wanted to discuss this today is because I hear about it so much, is unlike alcohol or drugs, there's a kind of extra layer of shame associated-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... with pornography addiction for people.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So many times we've heard, oh, this celebrity was an alcoholic or drug addict. They wrapped their car around a pole, was arrested, this and that. Then they get sober, and everyone still loves them, loves them more, right? If we knew that a given celebrity was a porn addict or something, we look at that person differently.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Especially if they're male. We just look at them differently. And so reducing some of the shame around it, I think, is key to helping them recover, because I can tell you, the questions initially came in kind of like as is often the case with men when they're trying to talk about issues, that they were kind of cloaked in like, what are your thoughts about NoFap, which is this thing where guys withhold ejaculation.

Ryan Soave:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
Does it increase testosterone? Turns out in the short run it does. In the long term, it's probably not good for the prostate, et cetera. But then it turned out they were really asking about masturbation. They were really asking about pornography, and then All of a sudden, I don't know what changed out there, but there's been this deluge of questions from young guys of how they can stop engaging in online porn.

Ryan Soave:
A key to that is what you said about we look at them differently. They're going to keep it secret. And there's a saying, "Secrets keep us sick," but I believe there's a real, almost a biology to that, in that if you're holding it in, not sharing it, there's no really place for it to go but shame. And shame separates us. And separate, we're not connected. And not connected, we're alone, and alone, we keep carrying that forward. Alone, we're dead. Maybe not in that sense anymore, like we talked about earlier, but we're not really living. And so these guys are hearing you on a podcast and then DMing you, right? They're probably not in a personal close relationship with you, right? It's easier to send it there than maybe go ask for help with somebody in their area or go to a meeting or something like that because of the stigma. So it's good that you've opened up the ability for people to do that, but to continue to direct them back to let's try to treat this like we would any other addiction, at least from the standpoint of you've got to talk about it, you've got to have some sort of admission, you've got to be able to find a community around it. You want to be able to do work, most likely with a therapist or a team of therapists that can help you understand what's driving that behavior. You and I have had long discussions about trauma before. That's something I've worked with for many years or most of my career as I came into being a therapist. And in trauma therapy, we're often going back to seeing, we do a history and really kind of understand where the patterns started. And it's really helpful for me as a therapist when I can see where it is because I can start making sense of how people are behaving this way as adults when I can see all of the experiences they had, and especially the more negative, impactful ones, which tend to impact the brain. Like you always say, fastest way to plasticity is through a traumatic event. I believe that's how you say it, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. One trial learning. It just takes once.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Unfortunately, but luckily, there's plasticity in the other direction, too.

Ryan Soave:
It just takes a little bit-

Andrew Huberman:
Takes longer

Ryan Soave:
... longer.

Andrew Huberman:
You got to triple it. Yeah.

Ryan Soave:
I think that's where addiction comes in, too, because you can kind of feel a sense of plasticity if I'm drinking or if I'm doing drugs, right? I don't know if that's the actual term for it, but I'm not feeling like my brain is so stuck in that direction. I can act a little bit differently.

Andrew Huberman:
What comes to mind to kind of encapsulate all of it, because it gets to the underlying mechanisms, I think is beware the things that come easily and quickly.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Really beware of those things.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
If it's pornography, and you can get to experience of, well, it's not the experience of sex, but the illusion of pseudo sex, right? If it's easily available, beware of that thing. If it's a feeling of relaxation from a drink, beware of alcohol.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
If it's-

Ryan Soave:
Fast money.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. If you are very proficient at you lift a weight, you build muscle, you get attention for it, beware that thing-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... because there are all these positive reward signals that are masking what soon will happen, which is that that thing is going to make you kind of lopsided internally and make you crave it more. And so I think that there's something about these things that come easy. It's a problem, and I think I kind of like that in the sense that because many people are struggling, and we don't often glorify the struggle. We're all trying to struggle our way out of struggle. But struggle is distress, and as long as we're struggling, we're in the distress tolerance. I'm not saying people shouldn't aim to succeed, but, and forgive me for going a little long on this reflection, but I remember in graduate school, I had a paper that got accepted by the journal "Science," which is one of the three apex journals, "Nature," "Science," and "Cell." And I was over the moon.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I was like, "Oh my God, this is amazing." First author paper in "Science." Some people never do that in their career. I was doing it as a graduate student. And my dad, who's a scientist, said, "Prepare for the week afterward when you wonder if you'll ever do it again." I was like, okay, kind of a postpartum crash. And then my graduate advisor, I said, "Do we get to celebrate? Do we get to throw a meal or a party?" And she goes, "No. I suppose I could buy you a pizza, but that would be stupid." And this is Barbara Chapin, and very blunt. And she said, "No, the pleasure was the work of doing the paper." And I was like, I got it. And that's what taught me to repeat that process. I didn't always publish in "Science," but certainly in other great journals again and again. It's like the reward is in the process. The effort is the reward.

Ryan Soave:
And if there's no process or no effort, and we don't struggle. In one way, we're struggling with so much, and in other ways, we don't struggle with the stuff that we probably need to struggle with to move the energy out of our body. Michael Easter's book "Comfort Crisis" is great.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, yeah.

Ryan Soave:
We used to walk 10 miles a day, and we're not burning that energy. So we're just sitting there with this energy that used to just get disseminated, or we'd wake up in the morning, move through the stressors of the day, good, bad, and different. Even good things are stressful. If you have to go to three birthday parties on a weekend, even if they're fun, you're tired at the end.

Andrew Huberman:
Sounds like a dad.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah, it is a dad. I go to a lot of birthday parties and try not to get sick at them, especially when they're at these little indoor gyms and ball pits.

Andrew Huberman:
What's more rewarding than raising kids? But what's interesting, Michael Easter, with the "Comfort Crisis," doing these hard Misogi challenges-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... he calls them. Think about self-imposing discomfort so that you don't get pulled into the illusion of ... of comfort by these other things. I think it's becoming clear to me now that the things that come easy are the traps.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
They're the traps. So folks, if you're really good at something, doesn't mean don't lean into it, but if something comes really easily for you, you have to be very mindful of that thing and other things around it. Sounds like you created discomfort for yourself. Maybe there's a discomfort appetite that if we don't satisfy through healthy things-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... we will satisfy through unhealthy things.

Ryan Soave:
That's a very interesting concept.

Andrew Huberman:
I don't know where that would exist in the nervous system, but because you hear, oh, we're trying to avoid pain and go toward pleasure. That's true, but those models are too simple. So I like the idea of a ration of discomfort to experience every day.

Ryan Soave:
Well, isn't it that we're kind of built to expend energy and then sleep? And then wake up the next day and expend energy and sleep, and if we're not expending the energy, how can we sleep? And then we wake up with more, and we just carry the stressors from the day before, rather than just breaking it down. That's one of the beauties of recovery, where they talk about one day at a time.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, one of the last couple of weeks, there's always something each year that really pops, that gets kind of viral overnight. Last year it was the Hawk Tuah girl. This year, it's the morning routine guy, the guy that he shows his morning routine.

Ryan Soave:
Oh, okay.

Andrew Huberman:
And it got millions and millions of hits. And this guy does cold water on the face. He's working, he's praying, he's doing all these things. He's wearing no shirt. He's super jacked. He was getting attention for different reasons. Anyway, huge following, and the best comment ever was... Oh, man, this guy's going to come after me. He seems like he's got his life organized. Someone put a comment, "This guy spends all day preparing for the next day."

Ryan Soave:
Next day.

Andrew Huberman:
Which is the worst thing about optimization, right?

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
The whole purpose of tools like sleep or nidra and all these things, and you taught me this, really good protocols let you lean into life more, not less.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's not about withdrawing and getting into a wellness loop where you're just preparing for the next day.

Ryan Soave:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
It's about being able to lean into the third birthday party where you're like, "Ugh," and the kids are sick, and you know you're being exposed to all this stuff, but you're there because your daughter needs to be there, and she's elated to be there.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Can we put on the shelf that perhaps we have an appetite for discomfort that we can either satisfy through healthy things or unhealthy things?

Ryan Soave:
I think that's a good way to put it.

Andrew Huberman:
Can we call it the Suave Huberman-

Ryan Soave:
We can call it the-

Andrew Huberman:
We'll go Huberman

Ryan Soave:
... Huberman Suave. It's fine.

Andrew Huberman:
Addiction means that somebody's already in the pit. Like they haven't done the, "Okay, I have a appetite for discomfort I need to satisfy with adaptive things." They're in the pit. So if you would, if people out there listening are in a place where they're like, they know something's got them as opposed to them having it, or they're wondering, or someone they know, and especially if it's somebody that they know, what do you suggest? This isn't like call the suicide hotline. Unless they're suicidal, obviously.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
A lot of people don't have means to start therapy with a world-class addiction therapist, trauma specialist. Some do, some don't. What do people do?

Ryan Soave:
Well, there are a lot of options for people out there. Sometimes they don't think that they have them because they don't have means, but in our centers, we strive to create access, and I know a lot of others do, too. So it's not just people that pay out of pocket. There's insurance and we build some quality treatment centers for people with Medicaid in different states. We don't know what's happening with that at the moment, but currently, they can get treatment for that. So if they're in a state where they needed detox or they're in a place where if they try to stop drinking or using, it gets pretty significant, there's services out there for them. Another great thing, though, is to just go straight into a 12-step meeting. They're everywhere.

Andrew Huberman:
How do people find those meetings?

Ryan Soave:
Go online, Google 12-step in your area. There's Narcotics Anonymous, there's Alcoholics Anonymous, there's Cocaine Anonymous, there's Overeaters Anonymous, there's Gambling Anonymous. Every one of them has a central office. The organizational structure, especially of Alcoholics Anonymous, is really incredible. We could do a whole episode on it. There's no leaders. It's a very flat organization.

Andrew Huberman:
Politically unaffiliated.

Ryan Soave:
Politically unaffiliated. They have a vow of poverty. If somebody died and donated a million dollars, they can't take more than 10,000.

Andrew Huberman:
Really?

Ryan Soave:
Yeah. There's only trusted servants. There's no leaders. There are people who are employed that do administrative work, but everything else, and it's been like this for 80-some years. It's really quite incredible.

Andrew Huberman:
And there are online meetings.

Ryan Soave:
There's online meetings. They're all over the world. You can find them at any time. That's one of the beauties of 12-step meetings is that, obviously, I'm a therapist. We have treatment centers. It's nice to get people to come to those, and it's great for people to be able to step out. But there's things that we can do that they can't. They're not going to medically detox them. They can't keep them out in a safe environment for a period of time.

Andrew Huberman:
But a kid with a porn addiction, somebody who's abusing alcohol or addicted to food, shopping, gambling, they can find a meeting.

Ryan Soave:
They can find a meeting. Yep. They can find a meeting and, I always tell people to try six different ones. They're free. You're going to find your group. Listen, they're run by peers, so this is like something that was developed as it would be like if somebody developed a therapeutic modality 80 years ago and then passed it on to everybody that they gave every client they had, and then they ran it. It's not run by professional counselors, although there are professional counselors, and then there's every walk of life from, I've been around people who are anything from priests to rabbis to doctors. There's no prejudice in the disease. But you can build a community where people are willing to help and be in service to each other. And you can't call a therapist any time during the night. You can't just look up and find a meeting and go. And at this point, with things online, you could find a meeting 24 hours a day anywhere. And the meeting's not going to solve it necessarily, but the fact that you're moving in that direction, if you're spending an hour thinking and reflecting and talking about it, even if you're not in silent meditation, it's almost like a meditation. If you're spending an hour hearing people talk about how they recovered and helping you, it's an hour that you're not doing the other thing. And in the beginning, that might be the white-knuckling of it, right? But the idea is to get out of white-knuckling. And so the beauty of the 12-step programs, which was founded by the guys that started Alcoholics Anonymous, and then it was Dr. Bob Smith and Bill Wilson. And the way they discovered it was by helping each other. Bill Wilson had been trying to get sober for a long time. He'd been introduced to something called the Oxford Group, which was more of a religious group based in Christianity, and they had, I think it was a four-step process, which the 12 steps are just kind of really expanded on. But in the literature, there's this beautiful moment where Bill Wilson had been trying to stay sober for a while, and he was, but he was really white-knuckling it. And he had been at his home in New York, he'd been going into the hospital and helping others, and he found by trying to help others, he stayed sober. And he's a guy that had struggled for a very long time. And none of those guys were staying sober, but he was, which was he first kind of conceptualized this. And then he was on a business trip in Akron, Ohio, which is where this Dr. Bob Smith lived, and he was staying at this hotel, I think it was called the Mayflower Hotel in the history. And he had come out of a business meeting, I think it didn't go the way he wanted, and he walked in. And in the story, he's describing hearing the bar and the kind of clinking of the glasses over here and the kind of the call of the bar. And he had some change in his pocket, and it was in the 1930s, early 1930s, maybe '34 or '35. And then there was a bank of phones over here. And so he was kind of pulled between the bar and the phones. And for whatever reason, he went to the phones. He paused, and he went there, and he called. I forget who he called, maybe the hospital, and I think he basically asked if there was any drunks in the town he could help. And they directed him to, in some way, to this doctor, who was like the local town doctor, Bob Smith, and he was also an alcoholic who had struggled for a long time. And they met, and I think he went to his house, or he might've been in the hospital at the time. I could have the history a little bit wrong. But they met and started talking, and I think Bob relapsed one more time, but they started talking and helping each other, and then they went and helped another guy. And then they went and helped another guy. And there's a whole history to how it developed and then how they wrote a book together. The book was really meant to send, it was written like four years later, send the information about alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous to everywhere in the country where they didn't have meetings. They started having these meetings and helping each other through this step process that they developed. And it's really interesting because this was one man's decision. Instead of going to the bar or going to the phone, instead of going to the bar, he made one phone call, and that transformed millions of lives. There's millions of members around the world. I think he was called either Time Magazine or Life Magazine's 100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century. And there's still people who find recovery through it, and then they gifted those steps to all of the other things like Cocaine Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous. And it's not for everybody, and they'll even say that in the literature. That's why I wouldn't consider it a cult because they'll say, "We don't have a monopoly." And of course, you're going to meet personalities in there, but the organization itself is agnostic to religion, to ideas, to politics, and it's a place that people can come and with a common problem and find a common solution. And these meetings can be the place that hold people as a container. I always see our treatment centers as like a container of space and time where people can come in and really let themselves fall apart, and we can start helping them build their life back. But these 12-step meetings are like a container, and people are excited in there to reach out and connect with you. And it's in those moments of connection that we can really find healing. Look at what happened to him. Instead of going into the bar and connecting with the people in there and drinking, and he had enough evidence to show that drinking would-- It didn't take him in the right direction. He was able to make a phone call, connect with somebody else, and it created all these connections later on. And it's not a place that people go just to white-knuckle it. That's why they might get in there. Nobody usually comes there because they had one bad night of drinking. It's usually, as some people say, "No one comes in here a winner. They've been on a losing streak." And that's okay, but to be able to admit that and really discover who you are and share that with others and find frivolity and joy in the depths of people's pain, and they can really understand that there's hope, there's promise, and there's a way out. And these people who are struggling aren't going to necessarily find that in their first meeting, but they might get the hope and the connection with others. And so they're available out there. And if you don't like the 12-step and the spirituality, there's other recovery programs out there or other peer support groups out there like Smart Recovery or Refuge Recovery, and they'll talk about things in a different way. So it's not about finding a specific dogma. Go out and try different things. Even the act of trying different things is going to help them move out of being stuck in, if it's like the porn addiction, right? And then people do reach a certain point in acuity, especially with drugs and alcohol, that they need to be in a facility. And that might be a hospital, it might be a treatment center. And there are resources for that. I think it's a good place for people to start if they don't have the resources to be able to attend a treatment center or work in therapy.

Andrew Huberman:
Thanks for sharing that avenue for people with all sorts of addictions, not just alcohol.

Ryan Soave:
And for the families. Al-Anon is for the families. There's Co-Dependents Anonymous, there's Families Anonymous, there's Adult Children of Alcoholics Anonymous. Or Adult Children of Alcoholics is really about dysfunctional family systems that people might have grown up, even if their parents weren't alcoholics. So there's stuff out there for everyone.

Andrew Huberman:
Prior to this conversation, I solicited for questions from the internet about addiction, broadly speaking, and got some great questions. The first question is, "Is addiction the problem?" They put the in quotes, "Or is addiction an attempted solution to a different but less obvious problem?"

Ryan Soave:
The short answer to that is both. The addiction is really the solution to some sort of discomfort or stress that they're experiencing, but then the addiction itself becomes problematic. I would say that addiction is the solution in the sense that it's the person's attempt to solve or to find relief from whatever stressor they're experiencing, but it's a solution that becomes problematic. So it takes on a life of its own. It becomes its own trauma itself. Drinking alcoholically and blacking out is a trauma to your body, to your brain. The things that people do in addiction become more traumatic. I think there's this cycle that I always use in the background called, it's trauma, stress, and addiction. And expanding the definition of trauma to wound, it starts with a wound, and then stress is the relationship to that wound, much like a limp after a broken leg. And when stress gets big enough, people look for relief, and so they look to behaviors or substances, which then can, if the stress is big enough and repeated, can become alcoholic. So that stress is not really the wound, it's the relationship to it. Like I said, the limp after the broken leg, but that limp, while it's not the broken leg, informs how we walk or don't walk, how we run or don't run, how we view ourselves, how we view the other people in the world view us, and all of those things together can lead to a level of stress where people find relief. And since it's chronic, then they keep using. But then the behaviors and things that they do while they're using or drinking create a trauma itself, which then leads to more stress, which then leads to more addiction. So it becomes kind of this perpetual motion machine, if you will.

Andrew Huberman:
So the medicine becomes the source of stress.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Are GLP-1 agonists, things like Ozempic, Wegovy, et cetera, being used for addiction outside the context of weight loss? Interesting question. And will this happen in an official capacity or remain off-label use? They're asking your opinion. Are GLP-1s being used to treat addiction to food, and do you think it can be useful for treating addiction to other things?

Ryan Soave:
I believe that there's some initial research going on that it can help with cravings and addiction in general. It makes sense to me. I've heard that anecdotally over the years that people that were diabetic and also alcoholic, but the diabetics that maintained their blood sugar properly had less chance of relapse. There's this very simple kind of an acronym called HALT you may have heard of. Hungry, angry, lonely, tired, which seems so simple, it used to drive me crazy, but it's so true that people tend to be at higher risk for relapse or using when they're either hungry, they're angry, they're lonely, or they're tired, and sometimes those things are all together, and those are times in which I would imagine their system is looking for something to-- If you're hungry, you're looking to elevate your blood sugar, and if you can maintain that, I would imagine that it would have some interesting effects. I was just at a meeting with some of the executives of the major insurance companies. Our company has a private meeting with them, and they were talking about that's some of the things that they're looking for. I'm sure it's been used off-label, but I don't know of anybody that's using it yet on-label for any of that.

Andrew Huberman:
Can somebody be addicted to stress? Meaning, are habits addictions? Those are sort of two questions. Clever. This person snuck in two questions. First question, can somebody be addicted to stress?

Ryan Soave:
I think that people can have their nervous system set in a way that they need that level of stress or activation in order just to kind of get to baseline, in order to kind of feel alive.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Soave:
I've seen that a lot when I've worked with, especially Special Forces combat veterans, coming home, a lot of the mundane stuff almost didn't feel like they felt alive.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Soave:
And of course, this isn't everybody. This is the ones that were coming to me, but that they needed to be involved in really risky behaviors or really high adrenaline behaviors. It felt like they were just getting to baseline of being normal. It wasn't even taking them to another edge. And that makes sense to me because a lot of what Basic training or the training that they do later on for more Special Forces is, while it's skills training, it's really nervous system training, right? It's the ability to do those skills under an extreme amount of stress or lack of sleep and everything like that. So if they're kind of oriented in that way, then when they come home or they're in environments where it takes a lot to bring them up just to that level of what might feel normal for them, their kind of system is set up much higher than here, and they've got to get up to that to just feel alive. So I don't know if addicted, maybe it is addicted. I feel like they have a need. You know?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm. It's a drive.

Ryan Soave:
It's a drive.

Andrew Huberman:
Intensity addiction. You and I know some people with that.

Ryan Soave:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. "I'd like to know about social behavior addictions, social media, coffee, sugar, even work addiction. And as always, thank you for tackling hard topics." I guess that was directed toward me, but you're the one who's about to try and tackle this topic. So, are those things really addictions? Are people addicted to sugar? Addicted to coffee? Do they meet the classic definition of addiction?

Ryan Soave:
Well, they're not going to meet a diagnostic criteria for it.

Andrew Huberman:
Progressive, et cetera.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah, but I mean, I-

Andrew Huberman:
What is the diagnostic? It's always this progressive...

Ryan Soave:
I don't know if it was, was it on your podcast or did I read about this somewhere else where when they took, there's the classic study about taking rats with cocaine.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Soave:
And they'll water and cocaine, and they would press that lever thousands of times to get the cocaine. Somebody else repeated that but added one that had sugar in it, and their cocaine use went significantly down when sugar was also present.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, meth addicts will consume sugar and meth more readily than-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... either one alone.

Ryan Soave:
I mean, we see this-

Andrew Huberman:
Different drug

Ryan Soave:
... we see this when people get sober, that there's people that will get very heavy. They'll engage in what looks like a food addiction, and when we peel that back, I can't tell you how many times I've heard of people recognizing their first addictive behavior was going to the sugar bowl and taking spoonfuls of it. I've actually heard people say that food addiction, and probably specifically around sugar, is often the primary addiction for people. It's kind of like how they get in there. I'm sure that's not true for everybody, but I think if we broaden the term of addiction beyond what a use disorder is in the DSM and move towards do you have it or does it have you? Absolutely. I don't think we can become sugar dependent in a way that if we stop it, we're going to go into some sort of major withdrawal, but I would imagine there'd be some sort of withdrawal. Same with caffeine. I've seen people go into psychosis with caffeine. There is a-

Andrew Huberman:
I never want to find out what happens if I quit caffeine.

Ryan Soave:
You might just always be in psychosis, caffeine psychosis.

Andrew Huberman:
Thanks for that.

Ryan Soave:
No, not you. I meant all of us.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. I mean, I love caffeine, but I keep it in check.

Ryan Soave:
You can take that out.

Andrew Huberman:
I can sleep well. No, no, that's fine.

Ryan Soave:
I actually can sleep on it, too. Like, never.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, I don't drink caffeine past 2:00 PM. Occasionally.

Ryan Soave:
I don't either, but once in a while I do, and it doesn't...

Andrew Huberman:
You're definitely getting less REM sleep in there, but-

Ryan Soave:
I'm sure I am

Andrew Huberman:
... you look rested, so.

Ryan Soave:
Not last night.

Andrew Huberman:
A lot of questions about ibogaine, probably because of the incredible work of my colleague Nolan Williams at Stanford with these single ibogaine trials for people getting over alcoholism, meaning taking ibogaine once or twice-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and mostly in veterans, was covered on the Rogan podcast, and Nolan's been on here. What are your thoughts on the use of ibogaine and other psychedelics? Let's leave MDMA out of it because that's more for the treatment of trauma, and it's not actually a classic psychedelic, but things like psilocybin, ibogaine for people seeking relief from alcohol and drugs specifically, but maybe other addictions.

Ryan Soave:
I've seen some pretty incredible things happen with people. And I'm glad that the studies have been going on specifically around psilocybin in the US. I'm not really aware of any around ibogaine, so anybody that is doing ibogaine treatments are either, I don't know if they're finding it in the US or they're going to Mexico or wherever, which is-

Andrew Huberman:
Has to be done in Mexico. They're doing the brain scans at Stanford before and after.

Ryan Soave:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
It's not currently, in the new administration-

Ryan Soave:
So they are doing some studies around it

Andrew Huberman:
... the rates of remission from alcohol use disorder and other substance use disorders is somewhere, there's a range, but 40 to, in some cases, 80% with one or two ibogaine trials. But this is with therapeutic support. There are a bunch of other things happening there. And then there's evidence of brain plasticity in a number of brain areas.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Ryan Soave:
So I don't know enough about the studies happening before, like they were doing this where Stanford was doing a study and taking people down to Mexico or people going down there to do it. It was kind of a lot of, I don't know how else to say it, but renegade folks doing it outside. It wasn't always run by medical teams and people making sure that everybody is safe, at least from my experience. Although, then I've seen some amazing things around it. My general take on psychedelics, if I look at PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, I really see that as you could almost substitute state disorder in there for stress because people get stuck in a certain state, and let's call it the survival state, and that's, as I've said, one of our biggest challenges is that we go into survival mode when we don't need to go into survival mode, an appropriate response at an inappropriate time. And so things like psychedelics, or we actually can see this with breathwork, can help people have an experience where they recognize another state, that they can be in another state. Not another state of the US, but they have access to something other than survival, and those touchstone experiences can really give them something to build on. I think Like any other approach to medicine that seems miraculous at times, there's a lot out there of, "This worked for me, so everybody should try it." I'm not concerned about the effectiveness overall of psychedelics, because I think there's definitely a place for them, but I'm really most concerned about the ethics that we develop around them. Who's delivering it? What are the rule-outs? I know we were going to leave MDMA out, but I know some of the MAPS studies, it was like three sessions, I think it was. And I don't think that the world that kind of sees those is then taking that, especially in the personal development world, and going, "We're going to do three sessions." It can kind of become something that we do all the time, or microdosing all the time. I don't know enough about it to see if that's going to have an impact. And there are people with psychological and psychiatric disorders that it can really impact in another way.

Andrew Huberman:
Definitely. Schizotypal, schizophrenic, bipolar.

Ryan Soave:
And I look at it like antibiotics, like penicillin saved a lot of people, but then there's people that it kills, right? I can eat peanuts and get protein out of them, and I know people that eat peanuts and they can die, so we-

Andrew Huberman:
Lousy source of protein, by the way

Ryan Soave:
... lousy source of protein. Eggs, let's say. But we need to really understand the ethics around it and the timeframe, and then make sure that people are following that up with something, because I think you've used this example before of kind of being on a trampoline, and you can jump up and see the top of the building, and you can see where you want to be, but you haven't built the staircase or the elevator yet. We've got to go out and build the staircase and the elevator. So I think they're a great window into how we can be and an experience of this person that I can be, but I don't think that there's going to be some immediate structural change that's going to last. And the danger in that is then people start using that over and over again and can lean on that as a crutch.

Andrew Huberman:
Last question. If we know somebody or are close to somebody that's clearly suffering from addiction or struggling with addiction, what can and should we do? This sounds like somebody who is aware of the all-too-common scenario of this kid, this parent, this coworker, this significant other is clearly an alcoholic, clearly a drug addict, clearly addicted to fill in the blank. What can people reasonably do, assuming that person is not in a medical crisis yet?

Ryan Soave:
I think one of the biggest things we can do is talk to them, but also without shaming them. And if you don't know how to talk to them, reach out for some help yourself. Like I said, there's family support meetings like Al-Anon that you can go to. If you reach out to a treatment center like ours, we're happy to talk to the families and help point them in the right direction. But having an open conversation without shaming them and understanding, approaching it with the idea, that this is a disease and like we're talking to a sick friend, not that we're talking to a bad person.

Andrew Huberman:
Can I ask/offer one, which is if a 12-step meeting is an open meeting, as they call it-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... like an open AA meeting-

Ryan Soave:
Oh, yeah. That's right

Andrew Huberman:
... you could offer to go with them.

Ryan Soave:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
When they do the around the circle thing, if you go and you don't want to say anything, you just say, "Pass." No one's going to-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah, in a lot of places, they don't even do around the circle.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Ryan Soave:
So you could take them to a meeting.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, as long as it's what's called an open meeting, you don't have to be an alcoholic or an addict to go to that meeting, and so you could take them. You could even go and just observe. Believe it or not, some non-alcoholics have come to 12-step meetings that were open meetings-

Ryan Soave:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... to learn more about it, to then be able to go help somebody that they know.

Ryan Soave:
And reach out and find a therapist that can do an assessment. In our mission to create access, we have been really doing some kind of innovative stuff around virtual care and in-home care, so when there are people that are resistant, and maybe it is true that they need to go to a residential treatment center, that we can offer this different service that's much lower cost and covered by insurance, that we can come in and kind of build a relationship with them. And sometimes it works for them, and they're able to move through it, and other times, we're able to help them witness their failures and then, having done complete assessments with them, get them to the correct level of care and make sure that the family has everything they need. So those options are out there as well.

Andrew Huberman:
I've seen the work you do help so many people. So, so many people. And so I just feel very lucky you could come on here and share with a lot more people.

Ryan Soave:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I'm sure you'll get some outreach. We'll put links to where people can find you and some of the resources and things that you're up to, and the papers and other things mentioned. But yeah, on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching, I just want to say thank you. You're doing incredible work.

Ryan Soave:
I was reflecting on this a lot before coming out here, but I really appreciate what you do in the world, and especially knowing you and knowing how and why you started it, and there wasn't this grand vision at the end. It was like, "I'm just going to help people today." I mean, you literally was like, "I'm going to help people today. I'm going to do these little diagrams and these little things, and I'm going to help them today." And helping people today and the next day and the next day has led to you having such an impact in the world. I was telling someone on your team earlier, your work makes my work easier. I've had men specifically, mostly men, that come to me more open because of what they've heard you talk about. And conversely, I've had men that we're working with that are very closed off, and then I'll have them listen to something that you've done, and it opens them up. My wife wanted me to tell you, she's a therapist, too, and she was running a group this morning with a group of kind of more mentally ill folks, and they were doing a group on stress management, and she used a video of the physiological sigh. So she wanted to say thank you for that. But I know lots of therapists that are using that, and you make our jobs easier by bringing awareness to the challenges and problems that are out there. So I really, really appreciate that. Plus, I just appreciate you as a human being and very much value our friendship.

Andrew Huberman:
Thank you for that. That's extremely gratifying to hear. And I'd be remiss if I didn't say that were it not for you and your support and the many things you've taught me and our friendship, I definitely wouldn't be doing this, and maybe wouldn't even be here today at all in the biggest sense. So thanks for everything. I appreciate you.

Ryan Soave:
Thank you.

Andrew Huberman:
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Ryan Suave. To learn more about Ryan's work and to find links to the various resources discussed during today's episode, please see the show note captions. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review, and you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled "Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body". This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience, and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation, and of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called "Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body". And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter, the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Ryan Suave. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.